Nature’s lack of a fixed baseline complicates legal sorting of human from natural change.

Evidence

This picture of the natural environment and its complex array of interlocking ecological systems sharply contrasts with the once-dominant but now-antiquated notion of nature as dependent on the maintenance of a static equilibrium. Nature is not at all static, but is constantly changing. As aptly described by one ecologist, nature “is only a shimmer of populations in space and time.” Hence, transformation or change cannot itself be dubbed either “natural” or “nonnatural,” or for that matter always be labeled “good” or “bad.” The absence of such a fixed natural baseline, of course, renders far more difficult any possible sorting out of human versus natural sources of ecological change, let alone determining which transformations should, as a matter of policy, be allowed, restricted, or even promoted. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 62

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The absence of any fixed natural baseline as a barrier to lawmaking is a dense, paradigm-shifting premise that underpins all environmental regulation and resists easy summary.
• XREF: Directly threatens environmental-justice framing: without a natural baseline, ‘restoring’ harmed ecosystems is legally and morally underdetermined. — connects to: Ecological injury’s spatial and temporal scales are ill-suited to how law is made. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 43; Geochemical cycles cause ecological harm at one place to spill over to others. — Richard J. Lazarus, The Making of Environmental Law, 53; Humans are blind to their own lack of an original fixed nature (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Humans are blind to their own lack of an original fixed nature #complicates (0.78)
• Environmental law’s impossibility is the precondition of its possibility #qualifies (0.72) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 596