Review Essay

• Storr, Cait

Abstract

International law has thus far proven limited as a tool for securing environmental justice for those marginalized by the international order. This essay reviews two recent publications that respond to the disproportionate effects of global environmental crisis on the marginalized within the framework of international law. It suggests that while both texts are important works of scholarship, each leaves an impression that international law, at least as we know it, is inadequate to the task of framing meaningful responses not only to the disproportionate effects of environmental crisis on the marginalized, but to that crisis itself. It is argued that the difficulty in utilizing international environmental law as a means of addressing problems of global environmental degradation may be better conceived not as a weakness in international environmental law per se, but as a symptom of the severance of human and natural environment that undergirds the logic of international law. Acknowledgment of the relationship between foundational concepts of international law and environmental exploitation invites sober consideration of the limits of international law as a framework for generating responses to global environmental crisis, and its disproportionate effect on the marginalized.