Imagine a world where the air, even in major cities, poses no serious health threat, even during the summer. Lakes once dead from acid rain have begun to recover. And trees and crops no longer die from air pollution. Many large cities and all rural areas have taken down their transmission wires, because the owners of homes, apartment buildings, factories, and offices rely upon fuel cells or upon solar power produced on-site. We may be too late already to avoid serious disruption from global warning, but this world would, over time, ameliorate climate change as well.

This Article addresses how well forestry law in the United States promotes sustainable development, with special attention to the trends of the past decade. The role of law in shaping forest management decisions has been a contentious issue in this recent period, and forestry has been at the forefront of public concern about sustainability of natural resource management generally. Therefore, the problems and opportunities for forestry law to promote sustainable development are indications of the weaknesses and strengths of the overall U.S. legal regime.

Introduction

The Agenda: "To Make International Trade and Environment Policies Mutually Supportive in Favour of Sustainable Development."¹

Introduction

This Dialogue seeks to respond to Prof. Jim Chen's recent Article in the Environmental Law Reporter, Diversity and Deadlock: Transcending Conventional Wisdom on the Relationship Between Biological Diversity and Intellectual Property.¹ In that Article, Professor Chen highlights the role of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)² in protecting biodiversity. This Dialogue argues that the CBD is an inherently ineffective mechanism to protect biodiversity.

Environmental regulation in the United States has been characterized by short-term decisions with unknown or unanticipated long-term public health consequences. Some propose to use our inability to predict possible long-term consequences of environmental health regulation as a justification for replacing risk assessment with the "precautionary principle" as the dominant paradigm for making regulatory decisions.

I must confess that I first read the U.S. Supreme Court's opinions in Palazzolo v. Rhode Island¹ with more than a bit of apprehension—not just because I was afraid about the fate of the nation's wetlands, but, more selfishly, because there was just the slightest chance that the Justices would abandon the highly problematic and unnecessarily confusing regulatory takings approach once and for all.

By the 1980s, deteriorating hulks of abandoned factories and overgrown vacant lots in many American cities served as notable symbols of urban decline. These sites had earned the label of "brownfields," which the U.S.

In recent years, the critical role of civil society and the public in protecting the environment has become clear. International declarations and agreements increasingly recognize that individuals, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and local governments are central to the sustainable management of natural resources and protection of critically important areas.

During 2001, an environmental justice suit by neighborhood groups challenging the siting of a cement plant in a minority neighborhood in South Camden, New Jersey, resulted in three complex and important decisions regarding whether there is a right to enforce in federal court the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Title VI regulations prohibiting disparate impact discrimination by recipients of the Agency's funding. The environmental justice plaintiffs won two decisions in the district court, but the U.S.