My friend Jill Fraley, a property professor and legal historian at Washington and Lee University, has just circulated a call for papers for a conference this fall on "Climate Change in the Former Colonies: Challenges of Property and History." This promises to get some really terrific discussion going, among several groups who don't usually talk with one another, but ought to: legal historians, and scholars of property and the environment. Here is the CFP (and a press release is here). The deadline for proposals is June 30, 2012.
I can imagine a lot of really interesting papers here — stretching back to the colonial era to look at how property law encouraged the development of the law (and maybe even how this is depicted in landscape art). I would imagine there's a lot that should be said about this in the literature of the nineteenth century — and perhaps even something from southern, pre-Civil War fiction on how the desire for economic development led to over-use of natural resources. Now that I think about it, Washington College's President Henry Ruffner had more than a few things to say about this topic, in his attack on slavery.
Of course there is an immense amount to say about this from a contemporary perspective, too — and I should imagine that the Shenandoah Valley is an ideal setting for this discussion. Though this is too far outside of my current research interests to deliver a paper, I am looking forward to attending the conference in Lexington on October 12.