Editorial. Las leyes de la naturaleza y de las naciones

• Author: Nicholas A. Robinson
• Position: Executive Governor, International Council of Environmental Law, at UC3M Kerlin Professor of Environmental Law Emeritus Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, New York
• Pages: 17-22

REDI, vol. 74 (2022), 2

EDITORIAL

LAWS OF NATURE AND NATIONS

Nicholas A. ROBINSON

Executive Governor, International Council of Environmental Law, at UC3M

Kerlin Professor of Environmental Law Emeritus

Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, New York

2022 is a year emblematic for International Environmental Law. Before

the United Nations Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in

1972, this field of law did not exist. There were statutes, and even internatio-

nal agreements by which States established norms and rules governing how

humans affected the natural world. Laws governing hunting and fishing, or

managing the harvest of timber, were common by the 18th century. As hunt-

ing depleted species, laws for sustaining their reproductive capacity emerged,

such as the Fur Seal Convention of 1911, which controlled commercial har-

vests of fur-bearing mammals (such as Northern fur seals and sea otters) in

the Pribilof Islands of the Bering Sea. However, laws for conservation of na-

ture were regarded as largely being peripheral to government or commerce.

To be sure, in human history there have been seminal events that esta-

blished fundamental rules governing nature. Justinian’s Institutes (534) had

codified the public trust doctrine, later ensuring public rights of access to wa-

terways in legal systems that embraced the Corpus Juris. Centuries later, the

promulgation of Magna Carta’s principles for the rule of law in 1215, Carta de

Foresta in England in 1217 preserved public access to harvest nature’s boun-

ty: all persons, «omnes», held «libertates des forestis» and that all also had a

correlative duty to observe those liberties. By the late 19th century, it was in-

creasingly common for governments to designate public parks and protected

natural areas. Left out of this progression of law-making were the indigenous

peoples, whose cultures had sustained nature for generations.

These themes —establishing the rules for public access and regulating the

use and exploitation of natural resources— took on new characteristics with

the world-wide growth in human populations (from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.9

billion today), and the expanding capacity of the industrial revolution. Pol-