Law, as Dr. Elli Louka vividly demonstrates in this extraordinary book, is most usefully conceived as a process of clarifying and implementing the common interests of politically relevant actors. This conception is indispensable for understanding the development of international environmental law. The spread of industrialization, with its ever more intensive uses of the resources of the planet, followed by the evolution of a global civilization of science and technology and, in part as a consequence of those developments, the explosion of the population of the planet from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to 2.5 billion in 1950 and to more than 6 billion in 2000, have combined to put unprecedented and unrelenting stress on the ecological systems on which the life of our species depends. No other area of lawmaking and law-applying makes so clearly and vividly manifest the indispensable functions of all law: the maintenance of minimum order, the allocation and regulation of the use of scarce resources, and the conservation and allocation of the benefits and burdens of the world's resources in ways consistent with shared conceptions of equity.

Approaching this subject as if it could be studied as a body of static rules would be sterile. Instead, Dr. Louka presents a dynamic picture, in which the diverse actors in the international lawmaking process clarify key principles such as sovereignty over national resources, precautionary principles with respect to equitable cost-sharing of environmental externalities, principles of sustainable development, and common as well as differentiated responsibilities.