and pull from climate change losers to climate change
winners will grow in intensity. At that point the in-
ternational community must make a fateful choice:
will the state system, facing growing resource scarcity
and worsening environmental degradation, fight to
preserve itself in an every-state-for-itself fashion, or
will it opt for a collaborative approach based on global
sustainability?
Not until states perceive that the question is one
of human survivability at sustainable levels, will the
prerogative of territorial inviolability be surrendered.
The question we must ask now is whether sufficient
reason exists to act anticipatorily, to pave the way for
the paradigm shift that must occur. The precaution-
ary principle, on which so much of domestic and inter-
national environmental law and policy is predicated,
offers ample reason.
Experience in the environmental movement begin-
ning in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s cautions that
only disaster overcomes inertia (reluctance to accept
a new paradigm). Climate change has not yet pro-
duced the number and severity of disasters needed to
galvanize the international community into action to
mitigate climate change, no less enact an adaptation
mechanism as novel as a right of environmentally dis-
possessed persons to migrate. Work on such a legal
regime must nonetheless begin, so that implementable
solutions are ready when states become ready—or are
forced—to embrace them.
Sustainability must underlie the rights of persons
and the obligations of states. A disproportionate bur-
den may fall on climate change winners, the eight
Arctic states, for example, but there may be no bet-
ter humanitarian option. At all stages, effective con-
trols will be essential, to ensure stability, security, and
sustainability in transition. These will vary from the
sharon
(sharon)
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