Although economic globablization seems to be proceeding rapidly, progress in sustainable development law will not be shaped on an international scale but nationally. This point and other observations emerged during a speech by Environmental Law Institute® President J. William Futrell before an audience of students, legal scholars, and practitioners gathered for Pace University School of Law’s annual Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture on March 31 in White Plains, NY.
“We need to go beyond the current law of environmental protection to a new goal of law that encourages sustainable development instead of the current system which rewards unsustainable activity,” Futrell said. “Legal scholars need to examine how strands from different fields, property, tort, insurance can be woven together to facilitate sustainable development.”
Futrell’s Garrison Lecture was entitled “The Transition to Sustainable Development Law.” In it he assessed the outcome of last year’s World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa and made recommendations for future progress of sustainable development.
“Our laws governing development and our laws governing environment often act in conflict” he said. To illustrate the point, he pointed to agricultural marketing regulations that discourage farmers from growing fruits and vegetables organically because those rules set size and color price standards mirroring agri-chemical production. At the same time environmental laws exist to limit pollution from such pesticides.
The transition to sustainability will not be possible without a change in economic policy. “While the market is an effective instrument for determining the best and most efficient route through the calculus of prices, it does not determine goals,” Futrell said. “The market system is unable to account for environmental degradation because the crucial link between the environment and the market has never been forged: prices fail to reflect the full costs to the environment. Indeed, environmental goods and services are undervalued or are free for the taking.”
In addition, economic incentives that currently exist in law discourage sustainable decision-making and encourage short-term decisions that often result in harmful long-term environmental and public health consequences.
“Environmental law’s greatest achievement is its codification of a change in ethics, a legal recognition that, in the last quarter of the 20th Century, individual-and government-responsibility extends to the natural world,” Futrell said. “During the next 25 years, the most important development will be to spread this consciousness beyond environmental law to sustainable development law.”
The Lloyd K. Garrison Lecture at Pace University School of Law celebrates the vision, public spirit and life of the attorney whose legal acumen led citizens in their successful advocacy of environmental quality at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River. For more information about the Lloyd K.Garrison Lecture series contact Jennifer Riekert at 914-422-4128.