Law, science, and the environment forum: a meeting of the minds.

• Author: Rohlf, Daniel J.
• Position: Symposium

Environmental and natural resources law in the United States is undergoing a quiet revolution.

This assertion may seem audacious given Congress has not passed major environmental legislation for over a decade; on the contrary, in recent years the federal government has emphasized incentives and "partnerships" rather than regulation and enforcement to promote environmental protection goals. But behind the scenes of familiar debates over pollution control and resource use and protection, path-breaking developments in these fields have focused on the fundamental components of environmental decision making--who may participate, what data and information regulators may employ and how they may use that information, and even which potential environmental threats may be ignored and which cannot. This ongoing revolution has also transformed many facets of environmental dispute resolution. For. instance, the decisive battles between civil litigants today often come well before trial when one or both parties attempt to exclude from evidence their opponents' essential expert testimony.

The early years of environmental law centered on building a regulatory infrastructure with components such as technology mandates, environmental assessment requirements, and planning schemes. The Information Age revolution in environmental law now underway focuses on the questions, data, processes, and participants that make this regulatory machinery run. The key feature of this metamorphosis is its multidisciplinary nature. Answers to today's environmental questions often depend on the interplay between law, science, and policy: How does a regulator tell sound science from flawed? How much risk to human health or an endangered species is too much? What should happen in the face of uncertainty? Statutes and regulations alone cannot provide answers.

Perhaps the most visible symbol of this new direction in environmental law is the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared jointly by a former lawmaker and political leader, former Senator and Vice President Al Gore, and an international scientific panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In addition to underlining the importance of climate change as perhaps the defining environmental challenge facing humans today, the Nobel committee's selections made it clear that rising to this challenge will require not only joint input from the fields of law, policy, and science, but societies and a community of nations that can better...