1. Introduction
This review essay assesses Benjamin J. Richardson’s Before Environmental Law and argues that the book significantly reframes Australia’s environmental legal history. Rather than depicting the pre-1970 era as a legal vacuum, Richardson shows how land, water, and non-human life were governed through shifting configurations of scientific expertise, enlightened despotism, polyarchy, and markets. His case studies—including the River Murray Waters Agreement, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and Lake Pedder—demonstrate how developmental ambitions and emerging environmental concerns coexisted in contradictory ways.
The essay extends Richardson’s four-mode framework to European contexts—Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Po Valley—to explore how long-standing hydraulic institutions and administrative traditions shaped different governance trajectories. These comparisons suggest that environmental law evolves not through sudden statutory ruptures but through gradual reconfigurations of expertise, state power, pluralism, and economic imperatives. Richardson’s approach offers a productive vocabulary for rethinking environmental legal history beyond its conventional 1970s origin narrative.
Journal of Environmental Law, Volume 38, Issue 1, p. 139-148.