Workshop on International Law, Natural Resources and Sustainable
Development
Nothing Natural about Man-Made Environmental Law
Charles Sheppard
School of Life Sciences, University of Warwick
I discuss four aspects of international environmental regulations that I believe lie behind
much of the present dismal failure to protect our environment, even those aspects of it
which directly support people.
(1) Man cannot, and never has, ‘managed’ our natural systems; he can only manage
people’s impacts on them. The disconnect between this ecological reality and what policy
makers think they can achieve is an important reason behind today’s accelerating
environmental degradation.
(2) The present massive human mortality that arises from ecosystem failure, food scarcity
etc. results from mankind’s present requirement for one and a half to two planets with
present extractive use – not just the one planet we have. For some aspects, such as fishing,
our present demand is for even more. ‘Sustainability’ is the essential buzzword in politics
and economics, but almost never is the maintenance of biological resources capital properly
addressed. The latter, after all, should be the heart of ‘sustainable use’. The rise in
greenhouse warming and acidification of our oceans is indicative of us exceeding the world’s
capacity to service human needs or desires.
(3) There are many natural laws that govern how essential ecosystems function. Most of
these we do not fully understand, many we scarcely understand at all, some we can grasp
only in mathematical ways, but we ignore their existence at our peril because they will
always trump man-made laws. Thus, the general failure of environmental laws is partly
because natural laws are ignored in the first place but also, and more problematically,
because man-made laws may run counter to natural laws, or because, even where they are
known, enough special pleading by interested parties wins exemptions from obeying them.
Examples will be given.
(4) We are dependent on ecosystems for what we call services: food, oxygen, water
filtration and many more. Many of these are decreasingly able to support local human
communities, despite ever increasing environmental legislation. Very often, the needs of
say, fish species x are treated with no more weight than is an industry’s ‘need’ to continue
showing a profit or maintain employment by catching more of them, leading to decline and
collapse whatever ‘laws’ are made to protect them (often to the astonishment of those who
ignored the scientific input).
(5) The structure of international laws appears to me to be weak, allowing opt-outs etc. The
nature of the State, devised in past centuries, is assured to maintain that State, not global
life support system that should sustain it. I maintain that tinkering with present laws is selfevidently insufficient to arrest and reverse degradation of ecosystems that support us.