Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis (original) (raw)
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'The environment: how does the law contribute to its protection and what more can be done?'
2008
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Towards a Critical Environmental Law
This chapter aims to develop further the underlying aim of the anthology 'Law and Ecology', namely the production of what can be called Critical Environmental Law. Situated in this wider ecology of unhomeliness (no all encompassing oikos) and miscommunication (no unifying logos), environmental law finally faces its foundational paradox: that its conceptual limits are both potentially all-inclusive (since every societal problem can be seen as more or less environmental) and devoid of any content (since environmental law can no longer distinguish its ‘object’, namely environment per se). The traditional imaging of the environment as the thing that turns (French virer) around a stable pivot (a distilled sense of pure humanity) has been discredited in view of the collapse of the boundaries between the natural/human/artificial. In order to address this permeability, environmental law has the opportunity and responsibility to construct an adequate theoretical base for its role in environmental protection. The chapter argues for four critical environmental positions that are necessary for environmental law’s attempt at catching up both with other disciplines and the demands made to it by an ever-changing ecology. Thus, first, environmental law must theorise itself as acentric, namely conceive of itself as only one amongst a multiplicity of perspectives, none of which could ever claim to be central (yet all of them claiming precisely that); second, environmental law must de-individualise the individual and position the human in an ecological plane beyond anthropo/ecocentricity; third, environmental law must relinquish the (traditional ecological) ideal of unity and accept uncertainty as a structural and constantly present inevitability rather than an invisibilised externality; and fourth, environmental law must move beyond the illusionary construction of prescriptive idealities and focus on a measured legal description of its own limitations. Largely following a critical reading of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoiesis, and influenced by postecological, feminist, spatial and other radical theoretical writings, the chapter attempts to carve a space of critique simultaneously within and outside environmental law, a mirror of ethical responsibility against which the law can measure its potential, its limits and ultimately its objects of desire. In effect, critical environmental law is an acentric, postecological, manifold and self-aware “thrown-together” of events and spaces which become ‘solid’ and relatively permanent through repetition.
Web Journal of Current Legal Issues, 2009
In this comprehensive work the authors stress the multi-disciplinary nature of environmental law. They argue for a contextual approach to the subject, which approach is "less a choice of research methodology and more an imperative arising from the subject itself", law being only one aspect of environmental protection, itself derived from policy and politics. In so doing they draw on a wide range of textual sources coupled with various case studies. The book contains 17 chapters, divided into five parts: [environmental] law in context, the EU context, the international context, mechanisms of regulation (pollution control) and, lastly, mechanisms of regulation (controls over land use and development).
Law and the Coming Environmental Catastrophe
William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, 1997
See WORLDWATCH MAG., Jan.-Feb. 1997, at back cover (citing figures provided by the World Wide Fund for Nature). "3 See generally id.
Transnational Environmental Law, 2017
Scott explores how transnational law developments challenge understandings of what is ' legal ' and give rise to various conceptions of ' law ' , the most conservative of which resembles law ' as we currently know and practice it ' but adapted to actions or events that transcend national boundaries. 8 See ch 1, n 103. 9 See ch 5(II)(C). 10 eg ch 4(V)(B)(ii). Administrative lawyers are also confronted with the increasing use of policy and soft law in governance and (thus) judicial review actions: Robyn Creyke and John McMillan , ' Soft Law v Hard Law ' in Linda Pearson , Carol Harlow and Michael Taggart (eds), Administrative Law in a Changing State (Hart 2008). 11 See ch 3(II).
Environmental Justice in the UK: Uncertainty, Ambiguity and the Law
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