What Professors Tom Farer and Ved Nanda do not seem to understand is the positive implication for the development of human rights resulting from the United States intervention in Panama. Their views are so conditioned by a statist conception of international law that they seem unable to see through the abstraction that we call the “state” to the reality of human beings struggling to achieve basic freedoms. I am not talking about the human rights of American “matrons domiciled in Panama,” as Professor Farer puts it, who were “rescued” in 19th-century expeditionary-force style. Rather, I am talking about the human rights of Panamanian citizens to be free from oppression by a gang of ruling thugs. My focus is on the basic civil liberties and fundamental freedoms of the people of Panama themselves.

We read every day about the desecration of our environment and the mismanagement of our natural resources. We have always had the capacity to wreck the environment on a small or even regional scale. Centuries of irrigation without adequate drainage in ancient times converted large areas of the fertile Tigris-Euphrates valley into barren desert. What is new is that we now have the power to change our global environment irreversibly, with profoundly damaging effects on the robustness and integrity of the planet and the heritage that we pass to future generations.

In recent years, lawyers have begun to join ecologists in debating whether there are—or should be—obligations to protect the interests of future generations. This legal debate was preceded by a philosophical one, dating back to the early 1970s, on the emergence of a new or “ecological” ethic redefining the relationship between man and nature in such a way as to ensure the survival of the human species on earth. The background to the various ethical approaches has been the indisputable fact that humanity has accumulated a monstrous potential to destroy life on earth, and that it is using natural resources and the environment in a way that threatens the survival of future generations—at least, at a standard that we today consider worthy of human beings.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.