Introduction: thought, law, rights and action in an age of environmental crisis – in search of better future histories (original) (raw)

Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis

The original GNHRE Oñati International Workshop 2012-by which this edited collection is inspired, from which it draws and to which it addswas set up in full knowledge that the relationship between 'human rights' and 'the environment' (both as constructed (legal) domains) remains both complex and fractious. At the institutional level these two domains (even taken as unproblematic referents to commonly understood concerns) still have an uneasy connection notwithstanding increasing evidence of their interconnections, while at the philosophical level it has often been asserted that the individualism of human rights makes them inherently ill-suited, as a moral and juridical category, to address the inherently more collectiveand less 'anthropocentric'-concerns of environmentalism. Human rights and environmental law are also unevenly theorised. Human rights scholarship is richly reflexive, manifesting an intense, sustained and energetic degree of contestation and theoretical disputation. It is multi-faceted and multi-perspectival: its traditional accounts and * This edited collection was inspired by a series of articles resulting from a workshop, 'Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relationship', held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain, 14-15 June 2012 and coordinated by Anna Grear (Cardiff University). The editors of this collection would like to thank Karen Morrow, Louis Kotze and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos for their comments on an earlier version of this introductory chapter-and to thank, in particular, Lorraine Code for her close, analytical engagement with that earlier version; the anonymous reviewers for the Oñati Socio-Legal Series and Sol Picciotto, Cristina Ruiz and Angela Melville for their comments on and support for the original articles by which this collection was inspired.