Overview

Few if any U.S. environmental laws explicitly consider sustainable development as their goal or objective. At most, a few U.S. laws may be said to be partial or imperfect reflections of sustainable development theory and to incorporate portions of the concept of sustainable development. Nonetheless, recent quantitative indicators on a cross-national basis suggest that U.S. law and policy has been reasonably effective at promoting sustainable development.

On January 29, 2000, over 130 countries adopted the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Biosafety Protocol or Protocol).¹ The Protocol establishes international procedures applicable to the transboundary movement of bioengineered living organisms (referred to in the Protocol as living modified organisms (LMOs)). The adoption of the Protocol marked the close of over four years of intensive, contentious, and often emotional negotiations regarding the multibillion-dollar trade in bioengineered organisms.

Introduction

The key issue is no longer resource development and water quantity but resource allocation and water quality.¹

MS. WAGNER: Welcome to Learning to Live With the Data Quality Act. I am Wendy Wagner, a professor at the University of Texas Law School.

I. Introduction

The fate of humans has been intertwined with the fate of other animals since human ancestors scavenged the carcasses of non-human animals, nearly six million years ago. Feeding upon the meat of other animals gave these early humans a boost of protein, providing their brains with extra energy for higher level thinking. Thus began the rise of humanity and the flourishing of Homo sapiens.

Like other developed countries, Japan faces a serious soil contamination problem. Much of Japan's legal history, however, has failed to address the serious issue of soil contamination because Japanese environmental law focuses on human compensatory damages, injunctive relief, and environmental regulations to prevent further pollution. Unlike flow pollution,¹ which can be lessened when the source of that pollution is regulated, the damage from soil contamination is accumulative and infringes upon the human environment unless and until it is completely eliminated.

One of the most significant law review articles of the past decade in the area of environmental regulation is Wendy Wagner's "The Science Charade in Toxic Risk Reduction."¹ The gist of the article is quite simple: "Agencies exaggerate the contributions made by science in setting toxic standards in order to avoid accountability for the underlying policy decisions."² The article amply documents the existence of the phenomenon in compelling fashion.

One of the central concerns of environmental ethics is to clarify the moral relationship between present and future generations. How should we think about our ethical responsibilities to a continuing stream of unknown humanity? Virtually all commentators recognize that the future is entitled to moral consideration in evaluating our present actions.¹ We owe the future something; the questions are what and why. On these questions there is no consensus.

In the 1992 case of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council,¹ the U.S. Supreme Court held that "when the owner of real property has been called upon to sacrifice all economically beneficial uses in the name of the common good, that is to leave his property economically idle, he has suffered a taking."² A decade later, in Tahoe-Sierra Preservation Council, Inc. v.