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96 B.U. L. Rev. Annex 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/bulron96 and id is 1 raw text is: COMMENTS ON WHEN GOD ISN'T GREEN SARAH SCHINDLER* Thank you for the opportunity to participate in the symposium and provide comments about Jay Wexler's great new book, When God Isn't Green. Given that Jay is both a humorist and a serious legal scholar with a penchant for taking trips, it should come as no surprise that this book reads like a mix between a travel guide, a humorous ethnography, and an adventure memoir. In addition to raising important questions about conflicts between two important, competing issues, Jay provides vivid imagery of his trips overseas. I especially appreciated the image of Jay sitting at a bar drinking with a cat. In this essay, I'd like to make three small points that struck me as I was reading the book. First, I'd like to situate the book within a larger body of scholarship about the cumulative impact of small harms. I'd then like to talk about how big (or small) the cumulative harms that he's addressing in the book really are. I'll conclude with a brief word on animal welfare. First, with respect to cumulative harms, a number of legal scholars have written about the fact that individuals, and their actions, cumulatively contribute to significant environmental harms.' In the book, Jay provides many examples of religious practices that have negative effects on the environment. I view this book as falling within the literature addressing what are known as environmentally significant individual behaviors.2 The book fits well within the works of Katy Kuh, Jason Czarnezki, Jim Salzman, Mike Vandenbergh, Thaler & Sunstein and others on this point. The idea is that, if a single person is releasing a turtle into the wild, or lighting a bonfire, or cutting palm fronds, there likely wouldn't be a problem (or a book), because any harm to the environment would be de minimis. The problem comes from the fact that large numbers of religious adherents engage in these practices. Thus, we can't look at these actions individually. Rather, we have to look at them cumulatively, and when we do so, we might find that they impose harms that have a substantial negative impact on the environment. Although we historically have focused on large, industrial, point-source type polluters and pollutants, some scholars have begun to acknowledge that we must also focus on the actions of individuals that, when taken together, cause harm to the environment. * Professor of Law and Glassman Faculty Research Scholar, University of Maine School of Law. Thanks to Kellen Zale, Dmitry Bam, and Jason Czarnezki for helpful comments, and to Boston University for inviting me to participate in this symposium. 1 See, e.g., Katrina Fischer Kuh, Environmental Privacy, 1 UTAH L. REV. 1, n. (2015). 2 Id. at 1. 1

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