Environmental Performance Review: Self-Regulation in Environmental Law

Americans have explored self-regulation as a strategy for the legal treatment of environmental issues only slowly and reluctantly. This is surprising. The intellectual roots of environmentalism, after all, are in ecology, the science of self-regulating, autonomous systems. With the notable exception of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 ("NEPA"), the image of the human actor in environmental regulation has been that of a threat to, rather than a participant in, the ecological systems which regulation is designed to protect by controlling human interventions.

The role of regulation, from this perspective, is to stop avoidable interventions and to control the harmful effects of unavoidable interventions.