Art and the History of Environmental Law

Abstract

This article is an initial exploration of what the history of environmental law can learn from the arts. Looking at visual art (mainly paintings, with some drawings, prints, photographs, and poster art), supplemented by occasional glances in the direction of literary works, it asks what, if anything we can learn about the environmental law of the industrialized West of nineteenth and twentieth centuries before 1970, when environmental problems certainly abounded but before there was "environmental law". The focus is on pollution law, especially air pollution, with some attention paid also to land use law.

The paper explores, first, how art may be read as reflecting the conditions against which environmental laws developed (or did not); next, indications in art of the effects of environmental law; and finally environmental law itself as depicted in art.

Keywords: environmental law, legal history, art, pollution