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Some 40 years into the ‘modern’environmental era, how much closer is humankind to an ecologically and socially sustainable relationship with its environment, and what role can environmental law, in all its various forms, play in securing such a relationship? These are the central questions addressed by this book. The answer to the first question remains sobering despite several decades of efforts at environmental regulation. There have been notable successes, especially in the advanced industrialised countries, but in the past five decades environmental change has been more rapid than at any other time. 1 Virtually all of Earth’s ecosystems have been significantly transformed through human actions, causing widespread degradation of ecosystem services. 2 Far from improving since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit made ‘sustainable development’the centrepiece of international and domestic environmental policy …