BOOK REVIEW

Edith Brown Weiss, In Fairness to Future Generations: International Law, Common Patrimony, and International Equity (Innovation in International Law). New York: Transnational Publishers, 1988 (385 pp., S 59.50). Our legal systems share a crucial disability with our economic thought: they are unable to deal with the future in an effective way. A crucial component of environmental management, however, concerns the future: the need to forego potential benefits now for the sake of preserving the environment for future generations. This temporal myopia of law and economics is one of the reasons why both the legal and the economic profession have found it exceedingly difficult to come to terms with environmental imperatives, the kind of questions which arise when we are asked to determine the economic value of a single species or to define principles upon which to base a legal decision which would prohibit - or allow - its extinction. This is not to say that economists and lawyers have been entirely insensitive to these issues, although until recently there has not exactly been a rush to deal with them. In recent years, economists have begun to seek ways to calculate the value of natural resources by assimilating them to a capital stock; and criticism of the application of standard discounting procedures to the determination of future economic benefits is now so widespread as to be almost commonplace. It is obviously unacceptable to assume an economic value of zero for our unborn grandchildren and their concerns. The response of economists has still been to tinker with the profession, not to question its fundamental assumptions, at least not yet seriously. In many ways, legal scholars have an even more difficult time dealing with the future than economists, because there is no legel equivalent to the discount rate. The future simply does not exist as a legal category outside the interests of the present generation. Paradoxically, international law has done more than most domestic law to confront these issues, perhaps because international law is more accustomed to dealing with weak legal instruments in relation to important issues of mankind; that is a condition of life for international lawyers who do not have the certainties of the rest of the profession to retreat to. The future is in many ways just another area of 'soft law', much like human rights or the rights of women - parallels which this book is well aware of. Edith Brown Weiss has brought together the state of legal thinking on these issues at the international level. Her book is equally remarkable for demonstrating how much effort has already gone into confronting these issues at an international level, and showing how improbable it continues to be that states or individuals will feel constrained in their actions by legal consideration for future generations. In the initial sections, Weiss takes refuge in economic theory to explain the problem of intergenerafional equity, and the outcome is circular - because the inClimatic Change 18: 471, 1991.

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Book Review

adequacies of the theory of price which she employs reflect the very temporal myopia she is trying to avoid. But then she moves onto much firmer ground as she systematizes the more properly legal concepts which have been developed over the past forty years and which do indeed create a legal frame of reference for intergenerational equity. She discusses planetary obligations and rights and implementation strategies, and even though these may still be weak, it is helpful to have them systematically presented. She then discusses nuclear wastes, biological resources, renewable resources, water and soil; while atmospheric resources seem curiously underrepresented in this age of stratospheric ozone depletion, and the hazards of chemical degradation not much covered, the approach does allow a presentation of what has been achieved to date. Finally she discusses knowledge of natural systems as a resource; indeed, it turns out that knowledge and its conservation are probably the most important tool for implementing the legal concepts discussed before. The central position of knowledge of natural resources in the conclusions also explains the somewhat tortured combination of natural and cultural resources as covariants in the law of intergenerational equity. At one level, it must be recognized that natural objects and human artifacts - physical objects of the cultural heritage or the accumulating knowledge of humankind alike - are fundamentally different: one people control but the other they do not, and the law is ultimately about people and hence much more convincing on the issue of cultural heritage than of natural resources. At another level, the concept of common heritage of mankind was developed by Unesco and extended from cultural values to environmental ones, hence the intimate linkage. Weiss does us the service of showing a further important linkage between the natural heritage and the cultural one - preservation of the former depends on the vitality of the latter, its ability to continue respect for the past but also to learn new respect for future generations. In general it must be said that the book could have addressed these broader issues more directly. They are often more implicit than explicit; but in that Weiss follows good legal tradition in dealing with the future. Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755 U.S.A.

Climatic Change June 1991

KONRAD VON MOLTKE