* Associate Professor of Law, Valparaiso University School of Law. The author would like to thank Professors Bruce Berner, Laura Dooley, and Jack Hiller for their thoughtful review and comments. He would also like to thank Professor Hiller for his constant support and for providing innumerable ideas and resources regarding the topic. Finally, the author would like to thank Ms. Debra Colby and Ms. Malini Goel for their capable research assistance.
1 See Joel R. Paul, The Geopolitical Constitution: Executive Expediency and Executive Agreements, 86 Cal. L. Rev. 671, 749 (1998) (noting that the goals of American foreign policy after World War II are the suppression of communism and the spread of democracy; stating that the spread of democracy is facilitated through promotion of trade and economic stability); Ronnie L. Podolefsky, The Illusion of Suffrage: Female Voting Rights and the Women’s Poll Tax Repeal Movement After the Nineteenth Amendment, 73 Notre Dame L. Rev. 839, 885 n.204 (1998) (stating that the focus of American foreign policy is to promote democracy); Kenneth A. Dursht, Note, From Containment to Cooperation: Collective Action and the Wassenaar Arrangement, 19 Cardozo L. Rev. 1079, 1079–81 (1997) (arguing that now that U.S. foreign policy has succeeded in stemming the spread of communism, economy has become of equal concern); John D. Griffin, Comment, The Chinese Student Protection Act and “Enhanced Consideration” for PRC Nationals: Legitimizing Foreign Policy While Averting False Positives in Asylum Law, 66 U. Colo. L. Rev. 1105, 1118 (1995) (noting that the goal of American foreign policy is the spread of democratic capitalism).
2 See generally Alex Y. Seita, Globalization and the Convergence of Values, 30 Cornell Int’l L.J. 429 (1997).
3 For a general analysis of the institutional basis for this ideology, see infra Section I. This ideology will be referred to throughout the text as the ideology of “separation and domination.”
4 Members of the school of critics are generally referred to as cultural relativists. Cultural relativism is the belief that all cultures are valid on their own terms, and the claim that Western values are shared universally is a thinly disguised ethnocentrism. See Isabelle R. Gunning, Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries, 23 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 189, 190–91 (1992).
5 See Dianne Otto, Rethinking the “Universality” of Human Rights Law, 29 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 1, 7 (1997).
6 See id. at 1; see generally Jerome J. Shestack, Globalization of Human Rights Law, 21 Fordham Int’l L.J. 558 (1997).
7 See generally Neil Weinstock Netanel, Asserting Copyright’s Democratic Principles in the Global Arena, 51 Vand. L. Rev. 217 (1998).
8 For a general introduction to the principle of sustainable development and its central role in international environmental law, see infra Section III.
9 See generally James Trefil, A Scientist in the City (1994). Trefil explains his purpose in the first chapter of the book:
What is a city?
There are many answers you can give to this question, most of them equally “right.” Cities are large collections of people, they are hubs of commerce and industry, they form the nodes of national and international transportation networks. Each of these points of view adds something to our understanding of our great urban areas.
What I want to do in this book is suggest another point of view—another way to look at cities—that can add another dimension to this understanding. This other point of view is that of the natural scientist, who sees the various parts of cities as examples of the laws of nature in operation, and the whole as a system that can be described in much the same way as other systems in nature.
Id. at 3–4.
10 See generally Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (1991) (noting that virtually all of human history can be conceived of as the struggle of man to overcome hostile nature).
11 A number of environmental statutes adopt this perspective. See, e.g., National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. § 4331 (1995) (recognizing the profound impact of man’s activity on the natural environment).
12 Children’s stories and other myths provide a variety of images capturing this division. For example, men go into the wilderness to slay dragons, children are hunted by cunning wolves, and ugly frogs are transformed into handsome princes. In all of these images, nature is portrayed as ugly, scary, or threatening, as compared to the beauty and safety of man’s world. Moreover, man’s role is frequently cast as the slayer or dominator of nature.
13 See Willet Kempton, et al., Environmental Values in American Culture 39–40 (1995).
14 A number of texts have taken as their task the treatment of the concept of environment in society. See generally Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought From Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1967); William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (1972); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (1980); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (rev. ed. 1973); Oelschlaeger, supra note 10; John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions (1974).
15 Genesis 1:1–1:2 (King James).
16 See id. at 1:5–1:27.
17 Id. at 1:26–1:30.
18 See Lynn White, Jr., The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science, Mar. 10, 1967, at 1203, reprinted in Western Man and Environmental Ethics 18–30 (Ian G. Barbour ed., Addison-Wesley 1973) (noting the fact that man made in God’s image creates a radical split between man and nature).
19 The second creation myth of the Bible further supports the conception of domination. In the myth of the fall from the Garden of Eden, Adam is created from dust, followed by plants and woman. See Genesis 2:4–2:23. Adam is created to tend to the Garden as a caretaker. See id. at 2:15. “The vocabulary of the myth is that of a peasant farmer; the plants are domesticated and the gardener of Eden tends them . . . he is a caretaker, not a farmer.” Glacken, supra note 14, at 153 (internal citation omitted). In other words, in this Edenic paradise, work is not necessary, and man and nature live in a harmonious relationship. However, when Eve partakes of sin, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden into a world of disorder in nature, and man will now have to toil in nature in order to survive. See Genesis 3:17 (“Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of all the days of thy life”). Man’s role is thus changed from caretaker of an abundant nature to a role of toil, where nature no longer provides for him. Instead, he must craft and control nature for his survival.
20 Many scholars also point to the fact that man named the animals as further support for the understanding that man was superior to nature. See Genesis 2:19. (“And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”).
21 It is, of course, folly to reduce the sources of this ideology to just Western philosophy and religion. As noted by Glacken, even many of the ideas associated with the Greek and Judeo-Christian tradition have various complex antecedents. For example,
The conception of the earth as an orderly harmonious whole, fashioned either for man himself or, less anthropocentrically, for the sake of all life, must be a very ancient one; probably we must seek its ultimate origin in earlier beliefs in the direct personal intervention of the gods in human affairs or in the personification of natural processes in the naming of gods of the crops, and in the old myth of the earth-mother so widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world. There are hints that this conception was established long before the Greeks.
Glacken, supra note 14, at 36. It is important, however, to note the sense of separation and domination contained in both the philosophical and religious traditions due to their particularly strong role in the development of Western culture.
22 In Plato’s Timaeus, for example, the earth-creator, based on earlier mythological themes of God as needleworker, potter, and weaver, is analogized to an artisan who brings the world into a state of order, creating the universe of fire and earth and later inserting air and water between them. See id. at 44–45. Aristotle, while not necessarily a believer in an artisan deity, also argues that nature can be understood by analogizing its creation to the making of machines by man. Aristotle, Parts of Animals 55–59 (The Loeb Classical Library ed., William Helnemann Ltd. 1945).
23 Xenophon, for example, in remarking on a conversation of Socrates’, noted that it was Socrates’ belief that nature is ordered for the benefit of man. Socrates observed that there is light for everyday tasks but dark which is needed for rest. The seasons and earth were created so as to provide man with a continuous supply of food. Fire was created as a defense against cold and dark. Animals, too, were produced for the sake of man, who gains more advantages from the animals than from the fruits of the earth. Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus 297–307 (O.J. Todd trans., Harvard Univ. Press 1923). Aristotle, in Politics, expressed his belief that “[a]fter the birth of animals, plants exist for their sake, and that the other animals exist for the sake of man, the tame for use and food, the wild, if not all, at least the great part of them, for food, and for the provision of clothing and various instruments.” Aristotle, Politics 65 (B. Jowett trans., The Modern Library ed. 1943).
24 Glacken, supra note 14, at 41.
25 It is difficult to pinpoint the time of the beginning of the modern era and to identify the innumerable factors which characterize it. Clearly, it has roots in Enlightenment thought, particularly the rise of science, and also shares a strong relationship with the rise of industry and a change from feudalism to mercantilism and, ultimately, to capitalism. While this portion of the article is ostensibly organized along chronological lines, it is not the purpose of the article to suggest one force’s primacy in the rise of the modern viewpoint. Rather, it is only a complex interaction of these various forces that gave rise to the modern period. One example considers the interaction of the forces of science, economics, and industry on the rise of the modern city of Manchester, England:
[I]n the late eighteenth century the surplus capital accumulated from years of trade with the Orient and the New World financed the development of a new mode of production: the factory system. The organizing skills perfected over two centuries by English merchants, and the rational use of capital to stimulate as well as satisfy demand, were extended with sudden vigor to revolutionize the apparatus of manufacturing. In 1765 James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny. During the 1770s Richard Arkwright introduced the water frame for spinning thread. Then in 1785 Edmund Cartwright’s power loom completed the transformation of the textile industry to machine production. Along with James Watts’ new steam engine, these innovations signaled the end of one long era of human history and the beginning of another. And the driving motive behind the technological development was the pure and simple desire to increase productivity and wealth.
Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 12 (2d ed. 1994).
26 In particular, the scientific revolution marks a change in the metaphor of environment as organism to environment as machine. See generally Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1964). It has been argued that the metaphor of environment as machine has also played a substantial role in allowing man to dominate nature. Carolyn Merchant argues that the machine metaphor changes the idea of nature from a living, active organism to inert matter-in-motion activated by God. This view conceives of nature like a clock, each piece on its own a lifeless part of the full mechanism, acting only when being acted upon. God, in turn, wound the clock, giving motion to these inert pieces. Once nature could be seen as passive and dead, Merchant argues, it was easier to conceive of its manipulation. Merchant, supra note 14, at 195.
27 For a view of the impact of the forces of modernism on concepts of environment, see generally Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination 210–19 (1993) [hereinafter Wealth of Nature].
28 Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 78. Oelschlaeger captures the essence of these changes through a description of Galileo:
Galileo led the way into the scientific age in part through his use of the telescope. . . . Although he did not invent the telescope, he was the first to employ it in scientific inquiry. . . . Through the telescope Galileo confirmed the Copernican hypothesis. What he lost was the sweeping field of view of naked eye astronomy, the relation of the Milky Way to the starry sky, and the movement of wandering stars across the ecliptic plane. And perhaps, in his intense concentration, he lost also the sounds and smells of the night and the awareness of himself as a conscious man beholding a grand and mysterious stellar spectacle. Galileo was standing no longer within nature, but outside it. He became a scientific observer apart from nature, for it had been replaced with a theoretical object of inquiry. . . . [Galileo’s] world of nature is explicitly not a world of concrete experience. . . . [C]haracteristics capable of mensuration and quantification, and thus arithmetical manipulation, are primary and thus real qualities; felt qualitative experiences are secondary and subjective.
Id.
29 The idea of separation finds its ultimate manifestation in the philosophy of René Descartes. Cartesian dualism separated mind from matter. From this point of view “all human relations to nature are mere epiphenomena.” This new philosophy thus contributed to and reflected the new understanding of people and nature that was developing at the time.
30 See generally Francis Bacon, New Atlantis, in Francis Bacon: Essays, Advancement of Learning, New Atlantis and Other Pieces (Richard Foster Jones ed., 1937) [hereinafter New Atlantis].
31 Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 81–82.
32 Merchant, supra note 14, at 169.
33 See New Atlantis, supra note 30, at 458.
34 Worster, supra note 25, at 30.
35 New Atlantis, supra note 30, at 480–81 (internal citations omitted).
36 See id. at 481.
37 See id. at 481–82.
38 See id. at 482.
39 Id. at 482–83 (internal citations omitted).
40 See New Atlantis, supra note 30, at 483.
41 See Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 81.
42 In conjunction with the image of dependence came an ethical concern not to harm humankind’s provider. The pre-Baconian natural philosophy was thus limited to helping nature. Bacon needed to overcome this limitation. The idea of the New Atlantis can, in this light, be perceived as an attempt by Bacon to advocate for the removal of ethical structures against manipulation of nature. See Merchant, supra note 14, at 184–85.
43 Worster, supra note 25, at 30.
44 The power of the image of a return to a state of grace was substantial. Bacon played strongly on the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden, as well as on images of gender domination in advocating for the new society. For an analysis of Bacon’s use of gender, see Merchant, supra note 14, at 164–80. See generally Leiss, supra note 14 (noting that Bacon connected his scientific advocacy with the myth of the fall from the Garden of Eden, implying the use of science as a way of returning to the prelapsarian state).
45 Bacon’s rising concern with the ability of science alone to direct the course of human culture led him to later suggest the need for two schools of thought: one for the invention of knowledge (science), and one for the cultivation of knowledge (modern day humanities). See Loren Eisley, The Man Who Saw Through Time 63 (1961).
46 The power of Bacon’s vision has been immense. Indeed, it is possible to argue that Bacon’s ideas have become so important to the future understanding of society’s relationship with nature that everything from his time on can be seen as variations of a Baconian theme. See Leiss, supra note 14, at 71.
47 The rise of industry and the related migration of workers from farms to factories most certainly influenced the division of man from nature as well. The movement of man into cities marked the first time in which the vast majority of the population did not live lives of subsistence on farms dispersed among nature. This physical separation reflected and influenced the developing concept of separation. Take for example, the relation between New York City and New Jersey (the “Garden State” for New York); the two were separated not just by an imagined border but by a river, as many American cities also were. Cities were not just physically distinguished from nature but also became associated with the attributes of the new scientific and economic ideals, a place separate and distinct from the barbaric characteristics associated with primitive life in nature. To be civilized was to live by the new ideals. For example, civilized man was, among other things, rational and not governed by his instincts. For a further discussion of the idea of nature as a place to escape the city, see infra Section I.C.3.
48 Harry Landreth, History of Economic Theory: Scope, Method and Content (1976).
49 See generally Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Edwin Cannan ed., Random House 1994) (1776) [hereinafter Wealth of Nations].
50 See Wealth of nature, supra note 27, at 210 (noting that, while all throughout earlier history there were people who lived by a materialist standard, it is not until the modern age that an entire culture can be found where material wealth creation is the dominant system of values).
51 See Wealth of Nations, supra note 49, at 33.
52 See id.
53 Smith measured actual wealth in terms of one’s ability to command labor. Money, he noted, changes in value, as do precious metals, whereas equal labor always means equal sacrifice to the laborer. Thus,
The value of any commodity . . . to the person who possesses it, and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command. Labour, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.
Id.
54 Like Bacon, Smith too embraced modernism with a utopian vision. He envisioned “a world where the engine of economic growth drove society relentlessly forward in a ceaseless expansion of the production-consumption cycle. Poverty—and the dreadful horrors, as he imagined them, that accompany a subsistence economy—were to be overcome by the Laws of Accumulation and Population.” Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 92.
55 Wealth of Nations, supra note 49, at 79 (internal citation omitted).
56 One author has argued that it was not until the New Deal that unfettered material growth overcame other, more visionary conceptions of government’s role in the marketplace and became the goal of political institutions. In The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations With Our Past (1985), Russell L. Hanson analyzes the rise of the New Deal vision. See supra notes 61–70 and accompanying text.
57 Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 92.
58 Wealth of Nations, supra note 49, at 31 (internal emphasis omitted).
59 Oelschlaeger, supra note 10, at 92.
60 See Wealth of Nature, supra note 27, at 215–16.
61 See generally Hanson, supra note 56.
62 See id. at 257–58.
63 The triumph of the New Deal had many causes, not the least of which were a lack of organization and the ineffective performance of the spokesmen for these other conceptions of democracy, along with other historical factors that made it difficult to mount a sustained attack on the democratic consumerism of the New Deal. See id. at 258.
64 Indeed, it is possible to argue that, with the rise of the industrial revolution and the technological advances of the time, society’s production problem had been satisfied. See id. at 270.
65 See id. at 269.
66 See Hanson, supra note 56, at 270.
67 See id. at 273, 278.
68 See id. at 280–81.
69 See id. at 281.
70 Id. at 258. For a detailed analysis of the way in which this change in government was realized, see id. at chapter 8.
71 See Henry David Thoreau, Walden 149–50 (Random House 1937) (1854). Thoreau decried how the valuation of nature solely as something to be used by man has alienated man from his spiritual connection to the land:
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so-called Thanksgiving, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling. . . . By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.
Id. Thoreau also recognized the role of science in the process of devaluing nature:
The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience. We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy but by direct intercourse and sympathy. It is with science as with ethics—we cannot know truth by contrivance and method; the Baconian is as false as any other.
Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History of Massachusetts, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau 131, 131 (Houghton Mifflin 1906).
72 “‘Romanticism’ resists definition, but in general it implies an enthusiasm for the strange, remote, solitary, and mysterious.” Nash, supra note 14, at 47. Transcendentalism has at its core a belief that man’s soul gives him the ability to transcend the material world by using intuition and imagination to penetrate spiritual truths. See id. at 85. While these two schools of thought are very different, they share many of the core characteristics to be described below.
73 See generally Robert C. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (1989) (relating a portion of modern environmentalism to the work of Thoreau and other transcendentalists). In advocating for the preservation of the Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, calls on transcendental values in analogizing the Valley to a temple:
It appears, therefore, that Hetch Hetchy Valley, far from being a plain, common, rock-bound meadow, as many who have not seen it seem to suppose, is a grand landscape garden, one of nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples. As in Yosemite, the sublime rocks of its walls seem to glow with life, whether leaning back in repose or standing erect in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, their brows in the sky, their feet set in the groves and gay flowery meadows. . . . Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike. . . . Nevertheless, like anything else worthwhile, from the very beginning, however well guarded, they have always been subject to attack by despoiling gainseekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial.
John Muir, The Yosemite 255–60 (1912).
74 Nash, supra note 14, at 45 (internal citation omitted).
75 Id. For examples of treatment of the sublime at this time, see generally Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (James T. Boulton ed., 1958) (1757); Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Berkeley 1960) (1763).
76 Nash, supra note 14, at 45.
77 See id. at 46. One well-known example of this aesthetic is the work of the Hudson River School of Painting of late nineteenth century America. Take, for example, a poem by one of the founders of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole, regarding his art:
Friends of my heart, lovers of nature’s works,
Let me transport you to those wild, blue mountains
That rear their summits near the Hudson’s wave.
Though not the loftiest that begirt the land,
They yet sublimely rise, and on their heights
Your souls may have the sweet foretaste of heaven,
And traverse wide the boundless . . . .
Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole 39 (Harvard Univ. Press 1964) (1853).
78 Nash, supra note 14, at 46.
79 Thoreau reflects this understanding in one of his most famous passages recounting his climb of Mount Ktaadn:
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untameable Nature, or whatever else men call it, while coming down. . . . And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman. . . . Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. . . . This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Nights. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever. . . . It was Matter, vast, terrific—not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in.
Henry David Thoreau, Maine Woods 93–95 (Harper & Row 1987) (1864).
80 Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?”: Work and Nature, in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature 171, 173 (William Cronon ed., 1995).
81 Nash, supra note 14, at 57.
82 Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour of Four Thousand Miles, Through the Western States and Territories, During the Winter and Spring of 1818, in Early Western Travels 1748–1846, at 102 (Reuben Gold Thwaites ed., Arthur H. Clark Co. 1904) (1819).
83 See supra note 13 and accompanying text.
84 See generally International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Conservation Strategy (1980).
85 See generally Lester R. Brown, Building a Sustainable Society (1981).
86 See generally World Comm’n on Env’t & Dev., Our Common Future (1987). The report is also referred to as the Brundtland Commission Report, named after Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, who chaired the Commission.
87 See United Nations Conference on Environment & Development: Rio Declaration on Environment & Development, U.N.C.E.D. Doc. A/Conf. 151/5/Rev.1 (1992), reprinted in 31 I.L.M. 874.
88 See Lakshman D. Guruswamy, et al., International Environmental Law and World Order 316 (1994).
89 See Marc Pallemaerts, International Environmental Law in the Age of Sustainable Development: A Critical Assessment of the UNCED Process, 15 J.L. & Com. 623, 630 (1996); Andrew Hurrell & Benedict Kingsbury, The International Politics of the Environment: An Introduction, in International Politics of the Environment: Actors, Interests, and Institutions 42–43 (1992).
90 World Comm’n on Env’t & Dev., supra note 86, at 43.
91 See id. (stating that the satisfaction of human needs is the major objective of development).
92 Id. at 44.
93 See id.
94 Id. at 43.
95 World Comm’n on Env’t & Dev., supra note 85, at 44.
96 Id. at 46.
97 See Wolfgang Sachs, Environment and Development: The Story of a Dangerous Liaison, 21 The Ecologist, Nov./Dec. 1991, at 257.
98 Id.
99 See id.
100 Id.
101 See Otto, supra note 5, at 19.
102 See, e.g., Netanel, supra note 7, at 243 (pointing out that critics of cultural relativism argue that at least human rights transcend cultures); Seita, supra note 2, at 471; Cynthia Losure Baraban, Note, Inspiring Global Professionalism: Challenges and Opportunities for American Lawyers in China, 73 Ind. L.J. 1247, 1263 (1998) (arguing that cultural relativism ignores the unity of traditions). Cf. Reed Boland, The Environment, Population and Women’s Human Rights, 27 Envtl. L. 1137, 1160 (1997) (stating that the concept of universal human rights is a Western notion not necessarily shared by other nations).
103 See Harold Hongju Koh, Why Do Nations Obey International Law?, 106 Yale L.J. 2599, 2650 (1997) (arguing that the cultural relativist debate based on the “claim that non-liberal states somehow do not participate in a zone of law denies the universalism of international law”); Shestack, supra note 6, at 567–68 (stating that “cultural relativists tend to look at cultures from a static, romanticized perspective. . . . But as anthropologists acknowledge, culture is flexible. . . . To recognize values held by a given people at a given time in no way implies that these values are a constant or static factor in the lives of current or succeeding generations of the same group.”).
104 See generally Kempton, supra note 13 (explaining the various metaphors that comprise the Western understanding of nature). What is perhaps most unfortunate about the exportation of the ideology of separation and domination is that it is taking place at a time when Western attitudes toward nature are being significantly reshaped by the ideology of ecology.
105 This concern continues to play a significant role in current debate over environmental law and policy. See generally infra note 114 and accompanying text.
106 White, supra note 18, at 24.
107 See id.
108 Id. at 25.
109 See id.
110 Id. at 23.
111 See generally Passmore, supra note 14.
112 White, for example, does not consider the tempering ideology of stewardship found within the Christian tradition. The idea of stewardship suggests that since nature is God’s creation, it must be treated wisely and carefully. For a detailed discussion of the idea of stewardship, see generally Francis A. Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology (1973). It is thus difficult to argue that Christianity sent an unambiguous message regarding the relation of man to nature.
113 See supra Section I.
114 One of the major components of an argument for a biocentric view of nature continues to be the psychic effect such a view will have on man’s willingness to exploit his environment. See Paul W. Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics 29 (1986), reprinted in part in Richard L. Revesz, Foundations of Environmental Law and Policy (1997). Taylor argues:
The attitude we think it appropriate to take toward living things depends on how we conceive of them and of our relationship to them. What moral significance the natural world has for us depends on the way we look at the whole system of nature and our role in it. With regard to the attitude of respect for nature, the belief-system that renders it intelligible and on which it depends for its justifiability is the biocentric outlook.
Id.
115 See id.
116 See generally Otto, supra note 5.