Toxic Loopholes: Failures and Future Prospects for Environmental Law - Tapa dura

The EPA was established to enforce the environmental laws Congress enacted during the 1970s. Yet today lethal toxins still permeate our environment, causing widespread illness and even death. Toxic Loopholes investigates these laws, and the agency charged with their enforcement, to explain why they have failed to arrest the nation's rising environmental crime wave and clean up the country's land, air and water. This book illustrates how weak laws, legal loopholes and regulatory negligence harm everyday people struggling to clean up their communities. It demonstrates that our current system of environmental protection pacifies the public with a false sense of security, dampens environmental activism, and erects legal barricades and bureaucratic barriers to shield powerful polluters from the wrath of their victims. After examining the corrosive economic and political forces undermining environmental law making and enforcement, the final chapters assess the potential for real improvement and the possibility of building cooperative international agreements to confront the rising tide of ecological perils threatening the entire planet.

Dr Craig Collins has authored articles on climate negotiations for AMBIO and the Clinton administration's environmental policies for Mother Jones. After teaching at Sonoma State University and the University of California, Davis in the early 1990s, he became part of the faculty at California State University East Bay, where he continues to teach environmental law and policymaking, Latin American politics, global political economy, US foreign policy, and several other courses. As visiting faculty for the University of Pittsburgh's Semester at Sea program, Collins has lectured on world affairs, climate change negotiations, US foreign policy and Latin American politics aboard ship on the program's world tour and its tour of the Caribbean basin.