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Why is the environment deteriorating in so many worrisome ways? What can be done about it? The author, a teacher of international environmental law, presents a clear and balanced overview of the perils facing the global environment, including climate change, deforestation, disappearance of wetlands, threats to biodiversity, toxic waste, and stresses on marine resources. Meeting these challenges would be hard enough in the best of circumstances. But Christopher Stone shows how the difficulties are compounded by the demands of the poor nations not to be denied the benefits of development - even if that means, as it often will, extra expense if the environment is not to suffer.
This is not yet another doomsday book. Readers have been bombarded with too many "dire conjectures . . . unrelieved by any glimpse of solution," the author complains - with the result that the public has been overwhelmed by a sense of confusion and fatalism. The ordinary reader will find Stone's own response both clarifying and uniquely positive. He argues that some undoubtedly serious perils, such as global warming, have probably drawn disproportionate attention, while far more immediate and lethal - but also more practically correctable - hazards, such as the looming worldwide shortage of clean water and the lingering threat of shoddy eastern European nuclear reactors, have too often gone ignored.
Stone proceeds to show that there is no one "silver bullet" for all these ills - not even (although he supports it) population control. He reviews a panoply of devices that should be considered, among them special pollution taxes, loans to poor countries conditioned on preservation of threatened ecosystems, and tradable fisheries quotas. Strategic options are not lacking. The problem Stone tackles is one of matching: what sorts of institutional responses are best suited to what sorts of environmental problems?
Along with critiques of existing practices, the author advances two major new policy recommendations: first, a system of Guardians to represent otherwise voiceless elements in the environment, such as species and habitats in the high seas; and second, a Global Commons Trust Fund based on the notion that the atmosphere, oceans, and space are the common property of all humankind.
