Urban And Industrial Environments

When natural gas drilling moves into an urban or a suburban neighborhood, a two-hundred-foot-high drill appears on the other side of a back yard fence and diesel trucks clog a quiet two-lane residential street. Children seem to be having more than the usual number of nosebleeds.

How local, specific, and personal understandings about belonging, ownership, and agency intersect with law to shape the city.

The precautionary principle–which holds that action to address threats of serious or irreversible environmental harm should be taken even in the absence of scientific certainty–has been accepted as a key feature of environmental law throughout the European Union. In the United States, however, it is still widely unknown, and much of what has been written on the topic takes a negative view.