Imaginatively Public: The English Experience of Art as Heritage Property

England was once hugely prosperous and possessed an extraordinary share of the world\u27s great art. In the years following the French Revolution, political turmoil in Europe brought a number of superb works of art on the market, and English collectors avidly bought them. Even earlier, young aristocrats returned to England from their grand tours with a keen appreciation of the aesthetic achievements of the continent and the means to acquire any works that pleased them. With few exceptions, these treasures entered the collections of individuals as their private property. In its scope, this was a unique experience in privatization, unlike both the past and the future. In an earlier time, Europe\u27s great art was generally publicly displayed in churches, public monuments, or held in royal and aristocratic collections where it was displayed to serve political purposes A gallery of pictures was an indication of princely worth; nobles acquired such galleries to demonstrate their wealth, power, and dignity. In the Middle Ages, the site for works of art was ...the church, that is, a public place, freely accessible to all who came and worshiped.\u27 On the European continent, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the museum in its essentially modern form came into being. Much artwork that had resided in noble collections, and some that had been displayed in churches, was moved into a new sort of public setting viewed as national property. This new setting was part of the nation\u27s cultural patrimony and was made increasingly open to a broader public in accordance with Enlightenment values

Defending the Environment: The Court as Catalyst

Based on a chapter of Professor Sax\u27s new book, Defending the Environment: A Strategy for Citizen Action, published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., N. Y., and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Copyright 1970 by Joseph L. Sax; reprinted with permission of the publisher. If every state were to pass a law making clear that courts should consider the merits of citizen-initiated environmental cases, part of the problem considered in the preceding chapter would be mitigated - that is, judges and attorneys would not feel compelled to twist the questions that the litigants are actually trying to raise into such traditional issues as a claim of arbitrariness or a failure to comply with some explicit statutory command such as how a dike must be authorized or how wide a highway right-of-way may be

The ESA: Oil and Water?

4 pages

Introduction

This symposium was conceived as a way of asking how much, and in what ways, environmental law had changed since its beginnings some twenty years ago. Except for Samuel Hays, a prominent historian of the environmental movement, none of the participants addresses those questions directly. By indirection, however, each one provides an answer. Far from fading away, environmental law has become institutionalized, an accepted and significant enterprise both for government and for attorneys. It was not always thus. Twenty years ago, there was probably not a single lawyer in the United States who devoted any significant part of his or her working day to the environmental problems associated with coal mining. Today, John Dernbach works for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as one of a staff of full-time professionals devoted to enforcing the state and federal mine reclamation law. The same is true in other states, and in the federal government

Introduction

Reading through the articles in this Symposium is like walking deep into a dense forest. The experience is exhilarating but edged by a concern that the farther you go, the less sure you are of where you are. The articles here reveal the problem of cultural preservation in all its complexity and many-sidedness. This is not one of those symposia where the authors seek to outdo each other in self-condemnation for the wrongs perpetrated by colonial invaders on hapless indigenous people. Neither is it a lament for the assault on science by advocates of modish multiculturalism. The essays here are serious efforts to understand and to explore the implications of one important strand of the contemporary interest in communities as a focus for political, moral, and cultural life

Hydraulic Empire

A Review of The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1170s-1990s by Norris Hundley, Jr