Environmentalism and the Disaster Strategy

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION Thinking about the third generation of international environmental law means trying to forecast the future. Many assume that this is an impossible task and that the rule prophecy, especially for the is to be strictly observed.(1) But it is an activity which many groups love: economists, political scientists, and social researchers on the one hand; environmentalists and environmental lawyers, on the other. However there is a difference between the two groups. For the expert of the first group, the future is not necessarily worse than the present: it could even be better. On the contrary, environmentalists and environmental lawyers constantly imagine the future ranging from bad to very bad. This attitude is not a new development. It is deeply rooted in environmental thinking. Beginning with the prediction of Malthus in 1798 that starvation in Great Britain was imminent, there has been an endless chain of predictions of catastrophe concerning irreversible environmental damage and unavoidable scarcity of food, minerals, water and other natural resources. A few examples are sufficient. In 1865 Stanley Jevons predicted the end of coal in Great Britain in a few years. In 1914, the United States Bureau of Mines reported that oil reserves would last no more than ten years. According to official reports of the US Department of Interior published in 1939 -- and again in 1951 -- oil reserves would last slightly more than one decade. In 1972 a world famous book, The Limits of Growth, predicted a coming shortage of world reserves of oil, natural gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminum, copper, lead, zinc and many other resources. All these predictions were completely incorrect.(2) Then in 1973 the World Watch Institute started its yearly forecasts of scarcity of food production. Year-by-year, predictions go on, almost always later proven inaccurate. Since 1961 the world population has doubled. And food demand has increased rapidly: every year there are 90 million more human beings to feed in the developing countries alone. Demand also increases because people in developing countries are wealthier: they have developed a taste for meat; and to fatten livestock it takes a considerable amount of grain.(3) But food production has more than doubled. Although the greater increase of production occurred in developed countries, while the population increases mainly occurred in underdeveloped ones (this makes evident that the problem is not so much of production, but of redistribution of the resources and of protectionism measures adopted and strictly implemented by rich countries against poor ones),(4) the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPI) and the World Resources Institute are persuaded that agriculture can cope with a growing population(5) for many decades to come. A similar history can be traced for pollution. During the Seventies the enemy was nuclear energy; during the Eighties, chemicals and acid rain. Chemicals were considered the principal cause of the increased incidence of cancer. However, recent medical statistics agree that the rate of mortality from cancer not related to smoking has actually declined since 1950.(6) The decline of the forests in Germany and in the U.S., confidently attributed in the past to acid rain and considered irreversible, reverted its trend years ago. FAO reports that forest cover in Europe (excluding the Former Soviet Union) increased by more than four percent between 1980 and 1994 and grew in the first half of the Nineties by three percent; in the same period growth in the United States was two percent.(7) Few today attribute the previous decline to acid rain. With cautious terms, the problem is now described as follows: Over the years, scientists, foresters, and others have watched some forests grow more slowly without knowing why. The trees in these forests do not grow as quickly as usual. …