ABSTRACT
Beyond concisely summarizing the major arguments this book advances, this closing chapter takes a critical look ahead. Emphasizing that moral principles should be informing our environmental laws and prompting stricter regulations, this chapter applauds the recent implementation of the Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act (2016), which revised several problematic tenets of the Toxic Substances Control Act and which uniquely parallels the central pillar of the standard of due care defended in previous chapters: specifically, the duties corporations have to test for the toxicity of the substances they use in their production processes or discharge into the environment, to disclose these data to regulators, and to provide details to the public on these findings in accessible ways for individuals to be able to better insulate themselves from potential harm. Paralleling these considerations, the Lautenberg Act relieves the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of having to empirically corroborate the presence of a credible risk or probable exposure before it can mandate companies to conduct toxicity test, it allows the EPA to designate substances as “high priority” whenever companies fail to provide adequate safety assessment data, and it expressly requires that vulnerable populations be protected from occupational and environmental exposure. And in underscoring the need for further policy reform, this chapter explores the implications of uncertain environmental threats and duties of due care on food security, global governance, and climate ethics.
