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Abstract

Professor Fred Bosselman of the Chicago-Kent College of Law specializes in energy, land-use, and environmental law. In his ground-breaking article, What Lawmakers Can Learn From Largescale Economy, Professor Bosselman argues that laws regulating management of natural resources and environmental protection must be amended to incorporate current scientific knowledge. Today, ecological scientists have dramatically expanded their ability to study the natural world in large quantities, both spatially and temporally. Although ecology still gains many insights from analysis of small-scale phenomena, large-scale ecology is beginning to make us realize that ecological systems are more than just the sum of their parts. Current research in large-scale ecology offers interesting lessons that should be useful in fashioning the environmental laws of the twenty-first century. For example, we have learned that if humans can keep their alteration of nature within parameters that ecological systems have experienced in the past, the systems are likely to retain existing ecological functions over broad scales of time and place. The key question is whether scientists can identify the limits beyond which we risk ecological collapse, and whether we can develop laws and policies that will keep us within those limits.

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