The 1992 Rio conference was a high watermark for environmental law. Despite all the many accomplishments since then, we must now acknowledge that Rio has not fulfilled the promises with which the world invested it. After 50 years of diligent and sophisticated work by environmental lawyers on legislation, regulation, principles, treaties, and judicial decisions, how is it that the " actual landscape" of the world"s resources is still "slipping two steps backward for each forward stride"? Part of the explanation for that disappointing result can be found in the statements issued by a distinguished international collection of prosecutors, judges, and legal scholars at the Rio + 20-re-lated World Congress on Justice, Governance, and Law for Environmental Sustainability. They focused almost exclusively on matters of substantive doctrine and legal procedure. Recommitment to enhancing "law" in this narrow sense—a body of formal rules and principles and the judicial and prosecutorial mechanisms for their application and enforcement—certainly has great value, and that work should go forward vigorously. But the ongoing ecological deterioration is traceable in large part to pervasive social and political attitudes favoring a growth-based model of economic "development" that steadily intensifies human appropriation of planetary resources. To address the root of the problem, it will be argued here, environmental law needs a more expansive society-based conception of "law", one that activates law as a social institution engaged broadly with the habits and customs, the expectations and aspirations, of people and organizations in their daily lives. Environmental lawyers, then, need a fresh and bold reimagination of their mission, to hone and use their persuasive and analytical skills in creative ways to alter the social dynamic underlying environmental change and to foment a deep commitment to effective stewardship of resources.