Abstract
Earth is home to all known life, on land, within the oceans, inland waters, and amidst the atmosphere. This community of life exists within well recognized frontiers. But, human induced degradation of ecosystems is rendering much of the Earth less habitable for the humans and the other species. To cope with the escalating insults to human life and health, governments have been establishing environmental laws since the 1970s. It posits a vital question at this juncture: What should be the functions that environmental law should serve, both today and into the foreseeable future? This article will suggest four thematic areas for action in this regard. First, all laws and policies should embrace a holistic view of Earth; second, a common and shared analytic methodology needs to be deployed such as environmental impact assessment; third, a strategic cock-pit for ecological cooperation required to provide solutions for environmental crises; finally, a set of mutually recognized and shared principles will need to be embraced in order to provide a coherent and harmonized outlook for humanity’s ecological civilization.
Keywords
Earth’s biosphere evolved uniquely, before and beyond humans. 1 Through progressive advances in scientific study, humans have come to understand their planetary habitat. 2 Earth is home to all known life, on land, within the oceans and inland waters, and amidst the atmosphere. This community of life exists within well recognized frontiers. From the stratospheric ozone layer to the deep ocean trenches, the biosphere envelops space around Earth of 20 kilometers (12 miles). Most life exists from 500 meters (1,640 feet) below the ocean’s surface to about 6 kilometers (3.75 miles) above sea level. Within their species’ habitat, humans have settled in vast numbers predominately along the sea coasts, away from which now they are migrating inland ahead of rising sea levels. Wherever they are, human beings live among and depend upon the biosphere’s ecosystems, whose diverse flora and fauna mix with water, minerals and other non-living matter in cyclical exchanges of energy and nutrients associated with the creation of new biota and decomposition of dead organic matter.
Humans in the Biosphere
Humans interact with myriad natural systems across the biosphere. Ecosystems are the cradle for civilization. For example, forests are biomes that host complex ecological functions such as carbon storage, nutrient cycling, water and air purification, and providing myriad habitats for wildlife. Humans enter forests in quest of their social, economic and cultural benefits, such as appreciation of beauty, spiritual renewal, recreation, and extraction of foods, timber, fuel and a pharmacopeia of bioproducts. Humans preserve some forests as parks, clear-cut others for industrial agriculture, and sustainable manage tree farms.
Until the agricultural revolution, as George Perkins Marsh first recognized in 1864, 3 humans lived among ecosystems like all other species, largely without destroying them. With the advent of farming and non-migratory settlements, some 4,000 years ago, humans began to alter Earth’s landscape. The once rich river basins of the Tigris and Euphrates, renown once as the “fertile crescent,” became arid and desertification emerged. Some 200 years ago, with the Industrial Revolution, human impacts reached beyond altering landscapes to imprint the entire planet with their ingenuity markers. Humans have invented substances, which were never naturally a part of their ancestral habitats, and then discarded them across all surfaces of the Earth as “wastes”: the radioactivity from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, novel synthetic and organic chemical compounds, plastics, and deposits of carbon dioxide and reactive nitrogen that alter the carbon and nitrogen cycles. Earth’s fossil record now reflects remnants of newly extinct species amidst Earth’s sixth great extinction phenomenon. 4
Human induced degradation of ecosystems 5 is rendering much of the Earth less habitable for humans and other species alike, as warmer ambient air temperatures, zoonotic spill-overs of emerging infectious diseases, wildfires, desertification, extreme weather events, melting of the cryosphere, ocean acidification and sea-level rise all follow in the wake of climate change. 6 The United Nations reports worldwide deterioration of environmental conditions. 7 Some posit that today’s 7.5 billion Homo sapiens on Earth have exceeded the planetary boundaries’ capacity to sustain life as we have known it for the past 40,000 years. 8 What anthropogenic changes will 9 billion humans bring about?
What does it mean for popular culture, taking their cue from geologists, 9 to acknowledge that Earth has left the Holocene epoch to enter the Anthropocene epoch? 10 Human society has largely ignored the accumulation of these impacts, treating them as economic “externalities” outside the responsibility of those who promote socio-economic development. To cope with the escalating insults to life and health, since the 1970s, governments have been establishing environmental laws. Although all governments cooperated in establishing this entirely new field of law, 11 the reforms have not been sufficient to stop, much less reverse, degradation of Earth’s biosphere.
Dominant Force Altering Earth
Since humans have become the dominant force altering Earth’s natural systems, how should humanity’s ethical precepts guide Homo sapiens’ terra-forming behavior? What should be functions that environmental law should serve, both today and into the foreseeable future? This essay will suggest four thematic areas for action, based on the five decades in which governments and civil society have interacted to create the environmental rule of law following the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment.
Humanity is becoming aware that it exists in a geophysical and ecological milieu never before known. There is much for science to discover as humans adapt to their new habitats. New legislative and policy reforms will accompany and stimulate adaptation. Humans can study and learn from inevitable feed-back loops and evolve norms that will facilitate effective adaptation. 12 If the past is the prologue to the future, as Environmental Policy and Law has chronicled for the past five decades, 13 governments, scientists and non-governmental organizations can strengthen their capacity to design, adopt and implement more environmental laws. 14
This prognosis, however, is far from assured because humans now exist in a new age. Past policy, legal and technological achievements have turned out to have been necessary but not sufficient to sustain the community of life on Earth. Past, and still current, assumptions are that international cooperation through environmental law would prevent 15 and control pollution 16 and produce patterns of sustainable development, as agreed by the UN General Assembly in Agenda 21. 17 In 2015, the world’s nations agreed on prescriptions to attain “the world we want” 18 in the United Nations’ “Sustainable Development Goals.” 19 Yet as of 2021, the prospects to attain the SDGs by the target year of 2030 are dim. Few, if any, States have altered their social, economic and environmental policies and laws to align them with the SDGs. The extractive industries continue to degrade wild nature. As humans disturb wild habitats, zoonotic spill-overs of viruses and bacteria bring novel infectious diseases to humans, such as COVID-19. 20 Inertia and a preference for “business as usual” have prevented States from taking the forthright actions necessary to attain the SDGs. Remediation of degraded ecosystems, mandated in SDG 15, is elusive and incremental environmental harm escalates everywhere.
So, while the human population grows in the near future from 7.5 billion to perhaps 9 billion, is it realistic to project that environmental law, as framed today, will be effective to restore “harmony with nature”? 21 What new and more effective functions might law serve? In a world of human settlements and governments, what priorities should policy and law adopt? How might we forge a new canon for the Anthropocene? 22 How can sectoral and instrumental environmental laws evolve into holistic ecological stewardship laws? 23
New Functions for Environmental Law
There are four over-arching functions for environmental law in the Anthropocene. First, all laws and policies should embrace a holistic view of Earth and learn how to govern within the framework of Earth’s natural systems. Second, a common and shared analytic methodology needs to be deployed in each nation, and environmental impact assessment provides that capability. Third, a central coordinating role must be defined to integrate and harmonize the many sectors that can help provide solutions for environmental crises. Finally, a set of mutually recognized and shared principles will need to be embraced in order to provide a coherent and harmonized outlook for humanity’s ecological civilization.
3.1 Only One Earth
As efforts to contain COVID-19 shuttered much of the world’s socio-economic activity, externalities have been reduced. Fossil fuel use has plummeted. Wild animals rebound. Pollution abates, and exploitation is lessened. Humans experience a reduced level of impact. Can humans accept this situation not just a “new normal,” but a step toward adapting to a sustainable harmony of humans with nature. This will require a “One Health” approach to the community of life sharing the planet. One Health is the universal policy and practice of care for the integrity, stability, resilience, and beauty of Earth’s biotic community through nurturing the interdependent health links that are shared among humans, wildlife, domesticated animals, plants, ecosystems, and all nature. One Health transcends and unites the contributions of the life sciences for stewardship of ecosystem integrity and biodiversity to sustain the health and wellbeing of life on Earth. Like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, One Health is holistic, requires cooperation that acknowledges the interdependence of all sectors of human behavior.
Restoring and embracing ecological health and integrity makes One Heath the primary duty of the state. Policy changes follow. Security no longer can rely first on military defense or armaments. The lion’s share of resources allocated to armed forces will need to be invested in public health and environmental conservation, ecologically sound agricultural practices, and disaster preparedness. As a consequence, after COVID-19 is contained, international cooperation has an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine priorities, set new standards, redesign practices, and build new socio-economic platforms without the environmentally destructive externalities of the past. COVID-19 obliged us, for a time, to tame unsustainable “production and consumption.” Enhancements to environmental law can consolidate those gains, building incentives to move rapidly to a circular economy model that eliminates waste.
3.2 Look Before You Leap: EIA
One easily available means by which to make this adaptation, at all levels of governments, is to reimagine the roles served by an environmental impact assessment and social impact assessment. The two functions can be united into one analytic process, as was initially the case. 24 By fragmenting analysis into separate realms for humans and nature, governments divided the community of life artificially. Since EIA requires that every decision at each level of government take precautions to study all possible adverse environmental impacts, weigh alternative actions that would avert harm, and mitigate all adverse impacts, EIA is uniquely suited to reverse incremental environmental degradation each time humans interact with nature. Prioritizing the use of a holistic EIA becomes a universal system by which best practices can be innovated, exchanged and deployed. This is possible because EIA legislation exists in virtually every nation. 25 Moreover, the UN International Court of Justice has found that the duty to conduct EIA is a customary rule of international law. 26 Since every nation acknowledges its duty to implement EIA, at international and national levels, comparable EIA laws and methodologies can be readily enlisted to enable rapid adaptation to the new conditions of the Anthropocene. Because many governments and economic development interests often misconceive EIA as a drag on a growth, they assign a low priority to EIA. Almost all require capacity-building to equip all levels of government with the means to implement the legal duty to perform EIA. In the Anthropocene, this neglect changes. EIA becomes one of the most important tools that ensure that the SDGs are attained and nations “rebuild better” after COVID-19.
EIA can also serve how governments plan 27 and cooperate to build closer cooperation to deal with the Anthropocene’s natural disasters 28 and to collaborate in the growing migration of people 29 away from living on the coasts, where inundation is guaranteed, to resettling in ecologically stable interior locations. 30 Both the extreme weather events destroying the built infrastructure of the past and the coming patterns of migration present an enormous opportunity to build sustainable human settlements anew, without the slums and pollution and supply-chain problems of living in Earth’s current mega-cities. The designs of energy-efficient and wholesome cities exist, and priority must be given to implementing them.
3.3 A Strategic Cock-pit for Ecological Cooperation
To coordinate inter-governmental policy and performance, enhanced capacities are needed, locally, nationally and internationally. Internationally, the United Nations can no longer address only the UN Charter’s priority on “collective security” to end the scourge of war, but must give equal or greater weight to the Charter’s focus on the Economic & Social Council (ECOSOC). For some time, scholars have recognized the need for an environmental trusteeship role within the United Nations. 31 Diplomats have recognized this also and launched the stronger roles for the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, with a stronger UN Environment Programme (UNEP). 32 The UNEA has universal UN Membership 33 , but issues remain because its roles overlap with the UN General Assembly, at which are held the forum on forests, the Law of the Sea sessions, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and policy deliberations of the Second Committee.
Proposals to strengthen intergovernmental cooperation and capacity-building are being debated under the mandate of UN General Assembly Res. 73/333. A stronger UNEA and better resourced UNEP are incremental and desirable steps, but so long as the UN Member States treat environment and development as separate objectives, they divide human society and fragment the community of life. In the Anthropocene, the time will come to merge the UNEP and the UN Development Programme (UNDP), into a combined Sustainability Programme, based on the same global consensus that is the foundation for the SDGs. Without doing so, the SDGs cannot be attained.
On the eve of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the time has come either to add ecological security to the mandate and agenda of the UN Security Council or to establish under ECOSOC a comparable “Ecological Security Council.” 34 No Charter amendment is needed to do so, only a re-organization of UN systems for decision-making by the Member States. A bureau of ECOSOC, entrusted with coordinating State action to address environmental crises, could work with the multilateral environmental agreements, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity or the Climate Change Convention, as well as UN specialized agencies.
All these environmental treaty organization have the same member states as the UN, so it is in the interests of all UN Member States to convene all capacities. For example, to control of zoonotic infectious diseases, like COVID-19, requires the World Health Organization, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Food & Agricultural Organization, and many others, including UNDP and UNEP. Impacts of climate change extend well beyond the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and include harmonizing the roles for the Convention on Combatting Desertification, the Arctic Council, the World Meteorological Organization, and many others. As the Brundtland Commission observed, “the Earth is one but the world is not.” 35 It is time for the world to treat the Earth as one system and create a central coordinating body for harmonizing policy and setting inter-agency and global priorities.
Each national and local government similarly requires a strategic center for environmental decision-making. Just as the natural laws of the biosphere is a complex and integrated whole, so the human laws for care of the regional watersheds, coastal areas, forests and other biomes need integration and harmonization. Although incremental decisions can be addressed as they arise, through re-imagined EIA regimes, an over-arching, all-of-government guiding authority is required. Given environmental degradation trends, states can no longer pretend to have ministries that “protect” the environment. The need is already evident for governments at all levels to reconstitute their agencies for pollution control, soil conservation, forest and wetlands stewardship, and management of wildlife and care of ecosystems. In place of sectoral agencies, there can a consolidated Ministry of Ecological Transformation. 36 Nonetheless, there will always be too many agencies that are not easily consolidated and cannot be. For enlisting inter-agency cooperation, a central Council on Ecological Security will be needed. 37 This central coordinating body can also oversee deployment of the many new tools that emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics and remote sensing, are providing for innovative platforms for collaborative problem solving across continents and time zones.
3.4 Guiding Principles of Ecological Law
Strategic and central decision-making also requires a common outlook, grounded in the recognition that all governments share the same biosphere. Without the common policy approach that shared principles provide, governments can coordinate inconsistently and agencies can perform at cross-purposes. Since the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, States have recognized a number of environmental principles. 38 The principle that was agreed at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro UN Conference in Environment & Development (UNCED, the “Earth Summit”) have been applied and implemented in the national laws of most nations.
For the Anthropocene, to attain the SDGs a further over-arching set of principles of law should be articulated and agreed, as States achieved in 1972 and 1992 and 2002. The 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment & Development has been enormously successful. The basis for replicating this success exists in the consensus that supported adoption of the SDGs and in the fact that the vast majority of nations already accept the right to a healthy environment in their national constitutions. 39 These can provide the framework for cooperation that supplements and provides a basis for coordinating among the existing network of bilateral, regional, international and multilateral environmental agreements. The occasion of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Stockholm Conference presents an opportunity for States to adopt a new declaration of principles for the Anthropocene.
Unlike prior political declarations of principles, the next articulation of shared principles should not be expressed in an ad hoc or sectorized manner. A holistic and ecological perspective should motivate their synthesis and presentation. This ecological perspective is being recognized in many different nations today, including China 40 and Costa Rica. 41 Earth’s biosphere sustains human life in every country and is the basis for protecting our shared planet. Where environmental law has tended to be sectoral and instrumental, the emerging framework of ecological law is harmonizing and integrating for attaining a biosphere perspective in governmental and all other decision-making. Nations are not acting as if they are governing in the Anthropocene epoch, not yet. The disruptions of climate impacts in the Anthropocene will either drive them to this shared awareness, or they will experience the loss of their cultural heritage and find that their very political existence becomes history.
Conclusion
As ecological law emerges in the coming years, this holistic vision will elaborate and doubtless further refine the contours of the four themes discussed in this essay. The ecological vision of Aldo Leopold long ago foretold this evolution. After a lifetime of ecological field studies and experiencing the great disruptions of the economic “Great Depression” and the desertification of the American “Dust Bowl” and then World War II, Aldo Leopold arrived at his “Land Ethic.” He observed that “we abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see the land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
In A Sand County Almanac published in 1949, 42 Leopold posited that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” He wrote that “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land … In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.” This recognition can guide humans through the Anthropocene to live within the community of life of Earth biosphere, and their ecological law can make it so.
Footnotes
Vladimir I. Vernadsky () The Biosphere (1926), available in English in several editions, e.g. The Biosphere(with annotations and commentary, 1998, D.B. Langmuir, Translator), Springer-Verlag, New York).
The modern quest to understand Earth may be said to have begun with Sir Isaac Newton’s posthumous study, The System of the World (1728), and restated most recently in the published syntheses of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/ (accessed on 11 January 2021), and the UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES); available at: 
(accessed on 11 January 2021).
See the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) report; available at: http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/; The AWG is constituted by Sub-Commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy in the InternationalCommissiononStratigraphy(ICS), which is the largest and oldest scientific member of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The AWC’s 2019 decision on the Anthropocene is reported in Nature; available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01641-5 (accessed on 11 January 2021). See “Anthropocene Now: Influential Panel Votes to Recognize Earth’s New Epoch;” available at: (accessed on 11 January 2021).
See Will Steffen, et al., “Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet” Science,13 Feb 2015:Vol. 347, Issue 6223, DOI: 10.1126/science.1259855.The law and policy implications of recognizing planetary boundaries is advocated by an NGO, Our Common Human Home, based at the Instituto Geofísico da Universidade do Porto, R. de Rodrigues de Freitas 4430-211, V. N. de Gaia –Portugal; available at: (accessed on 11 January 2021)
See Anthropocene Working Group Report, see note 4.
See Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” 36 : 8 Ambio (Dec. 2007) 614-21.; see also Joseph Stromberg, “What is the Anthropocene and Are We In It?” Smithsonian Magazine (January 2013); available at: (accessed on 11 January 2021).
See Nicholas A. Robinson, “Evolved Norms: A Canon For the Anthropocene,” in Christina Voigt, Rule of law for Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 46.
See Barbara J. Lausche, Weaving A Web of Environmental Law (2008, ICEL/IUCN 2008), at p. 147, where Lausche records EPL’s founding: “Another major ICEL initiative was the launch of a professional journal, Environmental Policy and Law. Begun in 1975 by Wolfgang Burhenne, with initial funding from FUST [The Fund for Environmental Studies, financed primarily through the philanthropy of Elisabeth Haub, Weisbaden, Germany], and continuing today, the journal aims to provide a medium for disseminating information on international environmental policy and law, and an important component of its function is to reproduce in the journal international policy decision documents, sometimes not otherwise easily available.”); available at https://www.iucn.org/content/weaving-a-web-environmental-law (accessed on 11 January 2021). EPL’s documentation function has been supplanted by the databases on the Internet, e.g. ECOLEX (IUCN, FAO, UNEP); available at: (accessed on 11 January 2021). EPL’s mission to evaluate and compare environmental law continues, as is evident in this symposium 50th anniversary year issue.
In its first editorial, Wolfgang E. Burhenne and Martin A. Mattes (eds), EPL vol. 1, p.1 (1975-76), wrote that “Our central purpose is ... to inform those active in the environmental field in one country of the theories and practices being developed in other countries or at the international level.”
The “No Harm” or Prevention Principle is restated in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment, in Principle 21: States have... the sovereign right to exploit their own resources... and the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction.
Polluter Pays Principle, Principle 16 of the 1992 Declaration of Rio de Janeiro on Environment and Development: “National authorities should endeavor to promote the internalization of environmental costs and the use of economic instruments, taking into account the approach that the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution, with due regard to the public interest and without distorting international trade and investment.”
See the annotations for Agenda 21, and traveaux préparatoires for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, in Nicholas A. Robinson (ed.), Agenda 21 and the UNCED Proceedings (6 volumes, Oceana Publications, 1993).
Principles of cooperation, biophilia and resilience will shape these priorities. See Nicholas A. Robison, “Evolved Norms: A Canon for the Anthropocene,” in Christina Voigt, Rule of Law for Nature (Cambridge, 2013).
See Kirstin Anker, et al., (eds.), From Environmental to Ecological Law (2021 Routledge).
See Section 102(2)(c) of the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”), 42 U.S.C. 4321, adopted in 1969; available at: https://www.energy.gov/nepa/downloads/national-environmental-policy-act-1969; (accessed on 01 February 2021).
Rio Principle 17 provides that “Environmental impact assessment, as a national instrument, shall be undertaken for proposed activities that are likely to have a significant adverse impact on the environment and are subject to a decision of a competent national authority,” see, CBD, “Rio Declaration on Environment and Development”; available at: (accessed on 1 February 2021).
Matthew E. Hauer, et al., “Sea-Level Rise and Human Migration,” Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume1, pages 28–39 (2020).
See Bharat H. Desai, International Environmental Governance: Towards UNEPO (Leiden: Brill/Nijhoff, 2014). See also Nicholas A. Robinson, “Befogged Vision: International Environmental Governance a Decade After Rio,” William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review 27 (2002), 299.
See Macharia Kamau, Pamela Chasek, and David O’Connor, Transforming Multilateral Diplomacy (Routledge 2018).
In 1970 in the USA, President Richard M. Nixon created the first ever US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by executive orders, combing bureaus out from existing agencies. France has taken an important step in creating a Ministry of Ecological and Solidarity Transition; available at: (accessed on 11 January 2021).
The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the USA created a Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President, but subsequent Presidents chose not to use the CEQ as the statute intended. See Section 201 of NEPA, 42 U.S.C. 4321. To be effective, this coordinating role needs to be directed by the governor or Prime minister directly; available at: (accessed on 1 February 2021).
See Ludwig Krämer and Emanuela Orlando (Eds), Principles of Environmental Law (2018, Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Law series 6).
See, e.g. Nicholas A. Robinson, “Ecological Civilization and Principles for Global Environmental. Governance,” Chinese Journal of Environmental Law 4 (2020) 131–162.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (posthumously published in 1949, Oxford University Press).