Navigating the U.S. Transition to Sustainability: Matching National Governance Challenges With Appropriate Legal Tools

development plan endorsed at the Earth Summit in 1992.The obvious point is that U.S. environmental policy waxes and wanes with different administrations and varying electoral moods.While this is an accurate, even if oversimplified, description of what occurs, it is worth asking whether this is what we should want or, more pointedly, what we need.To be very clear, elected and appointed officials in a democratic society should be responsive to the will of the electorate.And the "bottom up" growth of sustainable development efforts in recent years indicates that future presidential administrations are likely to be more supportive.Yet sustainable development would require the U.S. to implement over decades a significant substantive agenda that includes major reductions in its huge ecological footprint by, among other things, dramatically reducing its consumption of energy, materials, water, and land.How do we create an appropriate legal structure to reconcile those two objectives?This question is important because the United States has a large global footprint, consuming one quarter to one third of the world's energy and natural resources on an annual basis. 1 The costs of this level of resource use-to our economy, environment, and national security-are enormous.Reducing this level of resource use through greater efficiency, recycling, and reuse would strengthen our economy, create jobs, improve our national security, and improve the quality of our environment.Such efforts would likely have international consequences as well.Because of its international cultural influence through television, film, and music, the United States models "the good life" to people throughout the world-a life that is shown to depend on significant consumption of energy and natural resources.U.S. citizens use more than twice as much energy as their European counterparts, six times as much as the Chinese, and more than twenty-one times that of Africans. 2If the United States provided attractive and achievable models of sustainable development, it would show the world that a large ecological footprint is not needed to achieve high quality of life.This would encourage much of the rest of the world to pursue similar models.On the other hand, if the United States continues to pursue its current course, other countries-with fewer economic and technological resources-will be less likely to follow a sustainable course.This question is also timely.The inauguration of President Barack Obama in January 2009 offers an opportunity to revisit questions and start afresh.Finally, the question of an appropriate legal structure for sustainable development is important because most national efforts on sustainable development so far have focused primarily on policy changes, not law. 3While it is difficult to envision how sustainable development can occur without a legal foundation, the issue of an appropriate legal foundation for sustainable development at the national level has received less attention than it deserves.

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