Literature Review

In this article we adopt a political economic lens to analyse the revival of the concept of ecocide in present international legal scholarship and practice. The current campaign to codify the crime of ecocide under international criminal law represents the epitome of a problem-solving approach, which conceives of the law as external to society and as a corrective to its evils. Yet, a large body of critical literature has drawn attention to the constitutive role of international law and to the problems with its depoliticized approach when it comes to tackling global injustices. We build upon this diverse scholarship to illuminate how the technical, acontextual, and ahistorical legal debate on the codification of ecocide ends up normalizing the violent structures of extractive capitalism and its hierarchies. Further, we situate the proposed crime within the wider context of how international law regulates and constitutes the natural world. Drawing on critiques of sustainable development and of business and human rights discourse, we argue that the ‘imbroglio’ of ecocide, in its current legal definition, lies in presenting ecological preservation and devastation as simultaneously legitimate aims. The article ultimately raises the question of the role of international law in progressive political agendas, a question that could not be more pressing in times of entangled socio-ecological-economic disruptions.

The paper argues that Myanmar's current political conflict reflects an intersection of ecocide, indigenous struggle, and pro-democracy conflict. The paper observes that in the wake of the February 2021 Myanmar military coup, pro-democracy unrest encompassed a resumption of the military's historical conflicts against various indigenous minorities along with the military's escalation of natural resource extraction. The paper asserts that the military's actions against indigenous peoples and the environment are related, in that Myanmar's natural resources are predominately located within indigenous territories and the military has historically engaged extractive industries to consume those natural resources. As a result, theenvironment exists as a tension point between indigenous aspirations for self-determinationand military operations for domination, making environmental destruction an integral component of Myanmar's current political crisis. The paper frames Myanmar as a demonstration of how ecocide, indigenous peoples, and pro-democracy struggles can be associated together, and draws implications for the manifestation of such an association in conflict zones elsewhere.

Originating from my experience and fascination with the phenomenon of ecological grief, this project travels with the term, investigating it in an effort to think differently about the potentiality of ecological grief, rather than seeking methods for its resolution. I begin by delineating the temporality of grief as it is presently constructed, to make clear how even as ecological grief expands the boundaries of grievability, chrononormative demands constrict ecological grief to remain in accordance with capitalist cycles of consumption and substitution. This constriction forecloses the possibility of ecological grief to be generative, and sees it instead as illness requiring cure. Building from psychoanalysis, queer death studies and queer ecology, I then shift my focus to the concept of ecological melancholia. I present ecological melancholia as a politicized, queer and generative reformulation of ecological grief that resists, rather than naturalizes ecological loss. I explore ecological melancholia specifically for its sensory and temporally disruptive qualities. This presents the phenomenon as an affective mode of relation to the more-than-human that disturbs notions of normative futurity implicit in much environmental discourse. Displacing humanist notions of grief and staying true to my commitment to thinking alongside ecologies, rather than for them, I then illustrate the generative possibilities of ecological melancholia via submergence in what I deem a melancholy ecology. Thus this thesis ends with a journey to boglands. I learn from the ways that bogs “become-with” (Haraway 2008) death so as to begin to imagine alternative futurities outside capitalist chrononormativity, undetermined by the binary of promise and ruin. Instead, alongside the bog, I offer a line of flight for environmental imaginations in Anthropocene scenes of mass death, which foreground staying with what has been deemed ruined, rather than abandoning loss in the quest for continual progress. Alongside theory and analysis, this project incorporates ecopoetics to foreground the embodied, affective, and indeterminate elements of queerly understood ecological grief.

This chapter highlights how the devastation of Mexico's rich natural resources is facilitated by ongoing ties between transnational corporations and government institutions that deny critical environmental protections while marginalizing Indigenous communities and other at-risk populations. The central concepts of ecocide, ethnic rights and extractivism provide a guide for understanding how the intensive exploitation of natural resources for profit does violence to the environment, and to ethnic groups who have long been subordinated in Mexican society. Environmental justice movements are an important form of community action to redress past damage, reclaim rights and territory, protect the future of the planet and assert Indigenous people's rights to exist in peace. The chapter explores recent environmental justice struggles in four regions of Mexico: (1) an Indigenous group based in west-central Mexico attempting to reclaim and protect sacred desert lands known as Wirikuta, (2) a rural and community-based insurrection that returned self-rule and autonomous forest management to the highland town of Cherán, (3) a labor strike by agricultural workers in the Valley of San Quintín export zone near the U.S. California border, (4) infrastructure projects in Southern Mexico that have coincided with environmental activist land defenders being harassed, kidnapped and assassinated.

Over the course of 2021, several local councils across the island of Ireland introduced motions recognizing the ‘Rights of Nature’. To date, little research has been conducted into these nascent Rights of Nature movements, even though they raise important questions about the philosophical, cultural, political, and legal drivers in pursuing such rights. Similarly, much remains unclear as to the implications of such initiatives, both in their domestic context and for Rights of Nature movements around the world. This article contributes to addressing this gap by exploring these themes through an analysis of interviews with key stakeholders conducted across the island of Ireland in June 2022. In particular, it explores the impact of international movements, colonial legacies, cultural heritage, and years of inadequate environmental governance, in motivating local councils to pursue a Rights of Nature strategy.

This article aims to present an analysis of the evolution and contributions developed and integrated into the corpus of Earth Jurisprudence from practice in seven (7) South American countries where 135 records were found between 2005 and 2023. The case study was carried out using the methodological approach of the qualitative approach, the hermeneutic method, and the documentary review technique. The unit of analysis was based on the recognition of rights to nature, the data and information organized according to legal/political provisions, the state, the actor that initiated the action, and the ecological actor involved. Among the most outstanding findings, it is evident that a large number of records are concentrated in Ecuador and Colombia. The first correlates with the constitutionalization of the rights of nature and coincides with the second as they have been part of the stream known as new Latin American constitutionalism. In addition, a notable jurisprudential development recognizes nature as a subject of rights and declares it a victim of the armed conflict. Bolivia, which also joined this emerging denomination, has a different tendency than it had in its beginnings, not as the two countries mentioned above have done. Brazil stands out for its considerable increase in such legislative recognition. Argentina has a stronger emphasis on animal law. Peru has an incipient contribution to some regulatory implementation. Finally, Chile, the most laggard, tries it with a new constitution that recognizes these rights without having the approval at the ballot box. It is concluded the need to elevate the rights of nature and animals to constitutional status, claiming indigenous and ancestral cosmogonies regionally since it includes a legal stability that would facilitate the work of judicial and legislative actors and decision-makers for developing public policies, which would contribute to the practical development of the new Latin American constitutionalism and the Earth Jurisprudence.

Law has long been implicated in the extractivist practices that have made nature a global standing reserve, and the reckoning that is proposed by the discourse of rights of nature is long overdue. But judging by the cases that are held up as the leading precedents of Earth jurisprudence, cases such as that of the Whanganui river, the strategy of ascribing legal personality to natural beings has not achieved that reckoning. The effect of recognizing ‘Nature’ as a person is not to protect it from the depradations of global, corporate, capital. On the contrary, the ascription of personhood to nature merely resolves or suspends tensions that have been generated within the extractivist economy that took shape in the colonial period. And, ironically, this is because the discourse of rights of nature originates in the very epistemic conditions that generated twentieth-century fossil capital. The theoretical impulse generates images of a possible posthuman Earthly legality turns out to be genealogically complicit with the sense of surfeit that was generated by the availability of oil and processed energy (principally gasoline and electrical current), and which nurtured the neoliberal economy.

Everything one wants to sell you is said to be sustainable. But what is sustainability? Is it a value, does it have a price or both? After the official definition appeared in 1987, more than 300 definitions to the concept have appeared. Sustainability emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a moral value: it is difficult to be unanimous about what it is, but it is often easy to claim that a given action or practice is unsustainable. Values precede ethics. Modern ethics is Kantian that emerged largely as a reaction to the control of religion. Strongly humanistic, Kantian ethics is largely about the present, and for humans. German philosopher Hans Jonas, in the 1970s, claimed for an ‘ethics of responsibility’, concerned with beings who are not on this planet yet: future generations of humans and non-humans. This chapter claims that this kind of ethics is not quite in practice, but there are positive signs of change in this respect. It discusses Environmental Ethics, Rights of Nature and Earth Jurisprudence as early symptoms of the emergence of a new sustainability ethics.

This chapter discusses one of the ‘hard cases’ of nature’s rights: the case of invasive alien species. The question is how to balance the conservation of endangered species with the individual interests of invasive species. In this chapter, some of the recurring contradictions in the rights of nature framework are tackled through the lens of invasive species. Taking the case of the grey squirrel (sciurus carolimensis) as a starting point, the moral and legal issues surrounding the eradication of invasive species are assessed considering the current developments in the literature and case law. It is concluded that, whereas invasive species need to be contained at an early stage, full-fledged eradication programmes are only justifiable when no other alternatives remain as to the containment of invasive species. Since this more moderate approach to the management of invasive species appears already mandatory in the context of the existing regulatory framework, this chapter puts forward that it is also the way forward in the context of future rights of nature manifestations.

In this article, we examine what local well-being means in the contexts of collaborative heritage management and national development in Mexico. Driven by the request of Lacandon Mayas (including the second author) who live in Puerto Bello Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico, in 2018, we engaged in archeological consolidation and heritage management to promote local tourism and sustainable economic development. This collaboration raised a series of ethical and practical questions of how to engage with the Eurocentric project of development. Addressing these issues has become critical, as the Mexican president's signature infrastructure project, Tren Maya (Maya Train), is designed to promote nationwide development via increased cultural heritage tourism in Chiapas and southern Mexico. Through critical reflection on experiences with Metzabok community members, we address Eurocentrism and colonialism by enacting a Lacandon (i.e., Hach Winik) buen vivir. This form of well-being is relational and communal and creates a common good that includes more-than-humans. Via this critical perspective, we argue that a decolonial project can use the tools of development as an initial step in creating Indigenous well-being.

Earth jurisprudence is a philosophy of law and governance that perceives human beings only as a part of the wider Earth community. It emphasizes the necessity of deviating from the legal frameworks which keep the protection of human interests as its core objective. Today, more than nine jurisdictions around the world have embraced Earth jurisprudential principles through various constitutional, legislative, judicial, and institutional means. In May 2021, Sri Lanka faced one of the worst maritime environmental disasters in its history as “MV X-Press Pearl,” a Singaporean containership, burnt for several days just outside the port of Colombo with tons of hazardous and highly reactive chemicals, bunker oil, and containers carrying plastic pellets aboard. The incident which occurred in shallow waters endowed with high biodiversity caused unprecedented and irreversible damage to the marine environment, species, and resources. It reiterated that environmental disasters affect not only human beings but all other living and nonliving species who share the planet with them. Therefore, it is unequivocal that these nonhuman beings shall be empowered to protect themselves against anthropogenic environmental disasters. This chapter ascertains how Earth jurisprudence can be used to protect the oceans and ocean species in Sri Lanka from anthropogenic maritime disasters and to remedy the damage that they have already sustained. The author utilized the black letter approach to research and international and comparative research methodology to carry out the research. The chapter mainly focuses on Sri Lanka and refers to Ecuador, New Zealand, and India in drawing lessons for law reform. The chapter will provide guidance to protect the Sri Lankan oceans for more than the instrumental values that they hold.

This chapter introduces some of the main concepts and findings of a research study published in 2020 by the European Economic and Social Committee on the introduction of an EU Charter for the Fundamental Rights of Nature in the EU legal order. In the Study the promotion of a paradigm shift was proposed, and new legal concepts were discussed aimed to implement the principles of Earth Jurisprudence within a modern legal context in order to overcome the current failures of EU environmental law and promote a new relationship between humans and Nature. This chapter summarises the main points of the Study and tries to clarify better its main features and proposals.