ABSTRACT
Public concern over the environmental crisis has begun to stimulate not only action on the local and national level but also proposals for new international efforts, mobilized especially by current preparations for the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment scheduled to be held at Stockholm in June, 1972. Together with new programmatic instruments, like the Draft Universal Declaration on the Human Environment which is being prepared by a UN inter-governmental working group for submission to the Stockholm Conference, international conventions may indeed be a useful way of formulating certain basic principles of conduct in this comparatively new sector of international relations. If international standards for environmental quality are to be set by diplomatic negotiations, the technical components of those standards may well be outdated by the time agreement is reached, and even more so by the time the agreement enters into force.
