A detailed and comprehensive contribution to ongoing discussions about the future of the ESA.
A collection of think pieces about the future of the Endangered Species Act in the United States.
Attorney Baier follows up the examination of the ESA from Volume I: The First Fifty Years (2023) with a look toward the future. Since the passage of the comprehensive ESA legislation in 1973, the listing and delisting of different species as endangered has led to discussions, court cases, and political disputes. This volume, over the course of 14 chapters, features figures from academia and government contributing ideas about where the ESA is going and how to improve its impact. One chapter specifically looks at how to “change the culture within the professional wildlife community” to further the goals of conservation. Suggestions include implementing “pay for success” programs, such as those seen with water-quality programs in some states. Another chapter examines lessons from the 2012 conflict over the endangered dusky gopher frog, which numbered just 135 individuals in the entire state of Mississippi. Another engaging chapter is devoted to a practical workshop on the ESA, overseen by the University of Wyoming and Texas A&M University, that and aims “to develop…tangible action items to improve species conservation in the United States at the state and federal level.” Although the use of highly technical terminology tends to be limited, not every chapter will appeal to the casual reader; one, for instance, includes a passage about a resource equivalency analysis allowing “plan proponents to convert estimated take of individual species into equivalent habitat metrics to inform mitigation commitments.” But the book also digs into specifics about the ESA that laypeople might not otherwise encounter, as in the aforementioned discussion of the dusky gopher frog; the authors assert that several lessons can be gleaned by analyzing the fight over frog habitats and the resulting 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case, including “how to best encourage habitat creation and restoration.” Overall, this lengthy work offers insightful views on the importance of wildlife and the means to ensure its appropriate protection.
A detailed and comprehensive contribution to ongoing discussions about the future of the ESA.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-1538180143
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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