Geoscience Reference
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whoarelocaltooruseecosystemscanfeedintothebankofinformation
that the system is designed to produce also needs to be developed. Both
capacities must work together and be integrated with each other if
institutions for producing and analysing information are to be capable
of bearing the responsibilities to which Doremus refers.
The creation of institutional capacities that have allowed ecologists to
collaborate with policymakers in determining legal responses to envi-
ronmentalproblemshas,asIdiscussbelow,someprecedentsininterna-
tional law and its implementation at national levels. However, the role of
institutions in a legal system for the holistic protection of ecosystems is
of a different order as they form part of a permanent regime for manag-
ing activities in order to prevent problems from arising, rather than one
which comes into existence to address dif
culties that are already extant.
Accordingly, it is important that these institutions should be given a
clear and central role in the legal framework for establishing the system
so that they have a mandate for undertaking tasks that would support its
operation. Legally embedded institutions would also be better placed to
withstand the political pressure that they would be likely to encounter as
ecological and economic objectives come into con
ict.
7.2.1 Combining ecology and law: from problem-solving
to permanence
The discoveries of ecological science have had a growing in
uence on the
contents of policy and law since the environmental crises of the 1970s. In
their study of the relationship between ecology and law, Brooks, Jones and
Virginia argue that there has been a gradual convergence between the
disciplines and particularly in the formation of policy and legal responses
in the United States and internationally to the environmental problems of
acid rain and the depletion of atmospheric ozone.
9
They describe the role of
ecology in developing legal frameworks to tackle these problems as an
'
in which systematic research preceded legis-
lation and, in the case of international action on substances that affect the
ozone layer under the Montreal Protocol, has an ongoing periodic involve-
ment with the review of the controls that the Protocol puts in place.
10
experimental jurisprudence
'
9
Brooks, Jones and Virginia,
'
Law and Ecology
'
,p.231.
10
Ibid
., pp. 242
3. United Nations: Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer,
Montreal, 16 September 1987, in force 1 January 1989, 1522 UNTS 3, 26 ILM 1541
(1987).
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