Breaching the Maginot Line: The Frailty of Environmental Law in Europe and North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the recent history of North American and Western European environmental law to illustrate the pervasive weaknesses and failures of law to limit unsustainable exploitation and degradation of the biosphere. Although these regions are generally perceived as global leaders in environmental law, with some impressive laws on paper, there are significant deficiencies in their Maginot Line of environmental defences. Furthermore, these regions ostensibly superior environmental performance compared to other areas of the world is partly due to exporting their ecological footprint both spatially (to developing countries) and temporally (to future generations), rather than being a function of their environmental laws. The article focuses on environmental law at a European Union-level (rather than within individual Member States) and comparable efforts at the federal level in Canada and the United States. While no direct empirical research is provided, the article draws on other literature sources of such research. The article contrasts some patterns and traditions in European and North American environmental law including differences in regulatory styles, and discusses legal responses to biodiversity conservation to illustrate in more detail one aspect of their approach to environmental governance. Despite some regional differences, in the bigger picture North America and Europe have so far both failed to substantially reverse the poor environmental prognosis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".