Most books that discuss environmental law as a major theme tend to focus on the law, and then look at how environmental problems are dealt with in relation to the law. This text is different. It focuses on environmental problems. With a clear understanding of environmental problems in hand, it then turns to legal frameworks and discusses how those frameworks impact environmental issues; in essence, this text looks at how environmental problems are ingested into a legal process. The goal is to provide the reader with a somewhat unique perspective on the relationship between the law and the environment, meaning the law will be used in relational sense, providing a filter that helps us understand environmental issues from an applied perspective. An example may be helpful to understand this point. Imagine an environmental problem that needs a solution; it can be any type of problem. Let’s look at a difficult environmental problem: climate change. Climate change is a difficult environmental issue because it suffers from a lack of consensus on both the existence of the problem and how to respond to the problem, assuming it exists and humans can actually do something about it. While there is a general consensus that observations show a trend toward a warming climate, there is some debate on the role humans have in this trend, even in the face of mounting scientific evidence confirming the role of human beings in the warming process (IPCC 2007). There is also debate about how to respond to climate change, and in particular the role human beings should be playing in actively responding to the observed warming (Bryant 1997). Without getting into the weeds on this debate, let us simply assume that climate change is occurring, and further that humans are contributing to that change, primarily through the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.*