This article examines the increasingly important and often contentious relationship between international trade and environmental regulation in the United States. It begins by explaining why these two policy areas have recently become more interdependent and then explores some of the specific controversies surrounding the contemporary linkages between trade policy and environmental regulation. The article concludes by analyzing the long-term political and economic impact of the relationship between trade and environmental policy.

In 1994 a young journalist with a sharp eye for social anxieties and a flair for dramatic prose wrote an article that described environmental change as “the national security issue of the early 21st century.” Robert Kaplan's thesis in “The Coming Anarchy” is fetchingly simple: combine weak political systems, burgeoning urban populations, grinding poverty, and a flood of cheap weapons, and society becomes highly volatile. This lethal mixture, Kaplan suggests, already is generating high levels of violence in West Africa; soon it will affect the rest of the planet. This will happen because at the root of social collapse in West Africa is environmental degradation—a problem the entire world is experiencing. The pathways to chaos may differ from one place to the next, but all of humankind is being pushed along them. The state of the environment, Kaplan concludes, has become a matter of national security.

The years surrounding 1970 marked the coming of age of the modern environmental movement. As that movement enters its fourth decade, perhaps the most striking change is the virtual abandonment by national environ-mental groups of U.S. population stabilization as an actively pursued goal.

Environmental policy is about fixing a problem—a large, complex, foundational problem. From the 1960s to the end of the century, the United States engaged this problem on a wider scale and with more energy than ever be-fore, as a part of a global, multinational effort in this direction. Seen from our experience and vantage, what are the prospects ahead of humanity and nature in the ongoing negotiation of our relationship?