Breaking the Divide: Setting Environmental Precedent in the Chicago River

• In Event: 2251 - Section on Environmental Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 12. Sustainability

Abstract

In this paper we argue that socio-legal processes can not only restructure social relationships through setting legal precedent, but they can also restructure socioenvironmental relationships through setting what we call environmental precedent. By environmental precedent we mean the environmental consequences of legal processes, environmental consequences that then become the new material reality for future legal processes. We apply the concept of environmental precedent to a legal history of the Chicago River, using this case to illustrate how interactions between socio-legal and environmental processes can set environmental precedent in a way that reshuffles the social and material foundations of future legal processes. Here, over a century of legal dispute and conciliation indelibly altered landscapes by creating an artificial link between the Mississippi River system and the Great Lakes. Justified by the needs of sanitation and navigation in the early Twentieth Century, this linkage between major North American watersheds has, in recent years, resulted in the possibility of adverse ecological consequences that could have reasonably been foreseen at the time of its construction. Our goal is to initiate a dialogue between scholars interested in the sociologies of law and the environment, one that will help us to respond to contemporary forms of environmental change and the concomitant, ever increasing, dynamism within contemporary legal and environmental relationships.

Authors

• Daniel Shtob, University of Oregon

• Jordan Fox Besek, State University of New York at Buffalo