The fierce protests held against the meeting of the Third Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO), representing many interests: agriculture, labour rights, trade and environment,market access to developing countries. Albeit not a new issue in the international agenda, it is against this convoluted background that the trade–environment debate gains shape.

The establishment of the WTO in 1995 is a catalyst for the environmental critique on two fronts: a substantive critique of the new regime’s rules and a procedural one of the institutional lack of democracy. WTO defenders argued a rule-oriented institution meant progress for environmental protection and a more democratic central blind-spots of the conversation in combination with an application of Niklas Luhmann’s theory on social systems.

The two blind-spots are: (a) the assumption that the WTO is the 'epitome of the trade and environment conflict', the relationship between key concepts in the debate. The controversy spills out of the WTO, including different institutional settings, the fields of transnational arbitration, technical standardization, financial law, private legal systems.

A pluralist approach to the problem, continues Perez, ‘should be able to expose both cultural differences between
these various legal domains (which inevitably affect how they view environmental dilemmas), and the intricate linkages between them.

The second blind-spot is the proper relationship between nature/environment, trade/economic growth and democracy.11 Those are open-ended terms, whose lack of a unitary discourse explains how the constitution of the environmental movement as 'a powerful collective concern, the contents and practical consequences of this concern remain
undetermined’.

The substitution of the binary opposition nature/society to a multi-partite distinction, a triangle composed of three realms: nature (which includes living systems and a-biotic entities), societies (the multiplicity of communicative structures, which comprise the human society), and consciousness (humans). The comprehension of ecological problems requires decoding how these systems interact.Perez uses Niklas Luhmann’s communicative sociology to characterize social systems as "self-referential networks of communications". A product of recursive communicative processes, which mark themselves off the environment (that is, other social systems) through a process of self-reflection’. Under this analysis, society interacts with the environment through human beings, environment is the reality that humans seek to grasp through a communicative process (the social system) composed of three basic types: interaction systems (physical presence), organization systems (membership association) and societal
systems (all communicable experience and action, in fact the world society, as Luhmann indicates, comprised of functional sub-systems such as law, science, economy, politics). Thus,we could see Perez’s triangle (nature, society and humans) as a kaleidoscope that explains nature’s socialization: theparts involved areautonomous but constantly changing, forming new contexts, ever affecting each other, through co-evolution, or co-determination (variation, self-selection and stabilization).

The implications of Perez’s theory are clear: The primary challenge of the social sciences – from economics, to law and sociology – lies in developing richer and more accurate descriptions of the communicative processes throughwhich ‘nature’ enters into the social realm (that is, the variedways intowhich concepts such as ‘environment,’ ‘pollution,’ ‘conservation’, or ‘sustainable development’ are interpreted in distinct social domains). Perez inquires into thematic features of socio-ecological dilemmas, which means a two step investigation into, first the bio-physical properties and spatio-temporal boundaries of the problem at hand and, second, the social context surrounding it.

Effort to unveil the many facets of the international economic field and its responsiveness (or lack thereof) to environmental concerns. It is both a descriptive effort (at exposing the system’s structure) and a prescriptive one the generation of greater environmental sensitivity in the system.