Environmental conflicts over sustainability, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), biodiversity, biotechnology and risk, chemicals and public health, are not necessarily legalistic problems but land use problems. Edward Christie shows how solutions for these conflicts can be found via consensual agreement using an approach that integrates law, science and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and reframes the role of law and science. Finding Solutions for Environmental Conflicts assesses the key unifying principles of environmental and administrative law in Australia, the UK/EU and USA, together with accepted scientific concepts for environmental management and protection. By doing so it provides a cross-disciplinary approach to collaborative problem-solving and decision-making, using ADR processes to resolve environmental conflicts, and will be valuable to environmental professionals.
Finding Solutions for Environmental Conflicts has been written to meet the requirements of any environmental professional – lawyer, scientist, engineer, planner – who directly, or indirectly, may be involved in development or planning conflicts when the environment is an issue. For the lawyer, Finding Solutions for Environmental Conflicts, with its focus on understanding and integrating unifying legal principles and scientific concepts, consolidates opportunities for assessing and resolving environmental conflicts by negotiation. For the environmental professional, Finding Solutions for Environmental Conflicts provides opportunities for managing environmental conflicts. In addition, opportunities are identified for resolving environmental conflicts by negotiation, but in quite specific situations i.e. when the interpretation and application of questions of law are not in issue and only factual (scientific) issues are in dispute. It will of course be of great interest to academics and researchers of environmental studies and environmental law. It will also appeal to the indigenous community and environmental groups who are seeking more direct and effective inputs into resolving environmental conflicts.
Foreword: Justice Peter R.A. Gray, Federal Court of Australia
1. Introduction
2. Principles and Concepts in Environmental Decision-Making
3. Constraints to Participation in Public Interest Environmental Conflicts
4. Enforcement of Environmental Laws: Legal Rights, Conflict Resolution, Knowledge Power and Negotiation
5. Sustainability and the Environment
6. Environmental Impact Assessment
7. Risk, Precaution and the Environment: Biotechnology
8. Hazardous Chemicals and Public Health
9. Biodiversity and Threatened Species
10. Managing and Resolving Environmental Conflicts by Negotiation: NIMBY or NIMBI?
Bibliography
Index
"If this book is read, and its contents are heeded, as widely as is justified, then the days of the application of traditional dispute-resolution procedures to environmental disputes should be over in the 21st century."
- From the foreword by Justice Peter Gray