The natural world is going to hell in a handbasket. That is now a perception widely held across the globe, reinforced by the occasional issuance of national and international surveys of the declining state of biodiversity. Not very long ago, Bill McKibben ([1989] 2006) went so far as to suggest that we should declare “the end of nature”—a motion that Jedediah Purdy (2015) later seconded by instructing us that we all needed to learn to live in and with a world “after nature” (unless perhaps we could be happy constructing our own nature, which Braverman [2015] claims we have been doing for some time).
These observations are deeply disconcerting, because they appear to mean that, depending on where you start to count, a half century or more of determined and often quite imaginative legal and policy interventions at all levels of government and across...