Literature Review

Book Abstract: Wild law is a groundbreaking approach to law that stresses human interconnectedness and dependence on nature. It critiques existing law for promoting environmental harm and seeks to establish a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. For the first time, this volume brings together voices fromt he leading proponents of wild law around the world. It introduces readers to the idea of wild law and considers its relationship to environmental law, the rights of nature, science, religion, property law and international governance.

Despite its noble intentions and some victories, environmental law has been and continues to be complicit in driving the processes and paradigms that give rise to the Anthropocene. Environmental law is also unable to respond to the regulatory challenges that arise from the Anthropocene's complex Earth system. We need a new legal paradigm that is better fit for purpose in the Anthropocene called Earth system law. A key reason for environmental law's failures and an obstacle preventing its transformation, is its reluctance to embrace and respond to the notion of the Earth system. My hypothesis is that the Earth system metaphor should be key in rethinking environmental law with the ultimate view to constructing Earth system law for the Anthropocene. The primary purpose of this paper is to explore what the Earth system metaphor entails and what it might imply for environmental law's transformation to Earth system law.

Australian law currently treats the planet's resources, natural environment and non-human animals as property that can be bought, sold and used by humans. There is now vast scientific knowledge as to how ecosystems operate and that the least sophisticated forms of life support the more complex forms. Yet, in practice, the law favours humans above all else. If human beings wish to survive and prosper in the long term, Earth's dynamic systems and all other life must be protected. Legally recognising nature's rights is a practical response to insight provided by Earth system science and ecology. This article examines why Australia should start to incorporate the principles of Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence into its domestic legal system, and how this process might be achieved. Local examples are used as practical illustrations to show how different aspects of the environment could enjoy rights under a new system of law. The article also investigates whether there are some possibilities for the development of wild law and Earth Jurisprudence already present in Australian law.

The Anthropocene requires of us to rethink global governance challenges and effective responses with a more holistic understanding of the earth system as a single intertwined social-ecological system. Law, in particular, will have to embrace such a holistic earth system perspective in order to deal more effectively with the Anthropocene's predicaments. While a growing number of scholars have tried to reimagine law and legal scholarship in a more holistic way, these attempts remain siloed. What is required is a shared epistemic framework to enable and enhance collaborative intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary research and co-learning that go hand in hand with thorough transdisciplinary stakeholder engagement. We argue that the nascent concept of earth system law offers such an overarching epistemic framework. This article serves as an invitation to fellow explorers from various legal fields, other disciplines, and from a wide range of stakeholders to explore new frontiers in earth system law. Our aim is to further stimulate the study of earth system law, and to encourage collaboration and co-learning in a fertile epistemic space that we share.

This chapter examines Earth Jurisprudence arguably renders itself politically unpalatable, and so conclude by delving deeper into the question of strategy in order to explore the prospects or even the possibility of a Wild Law from below. It describes a word about whether it is appropriate to speak of Wild Law if the changes aimed for are brought about from below rather than from the top down. After all, conventional use of the word law implies a rule or body of rules emanating from parliament or the courts, and indeed Earth jurists accept that Earth Jurisprudence, human law is the essence of what is meant by the term law. Its meaning is largely consistent with orthodox theory. Parliament and the courts follows that Wild Law from below is not a coherent category on the grounds that it is not law, proper.

To date, most authors writing Wild Law have focused on philosopy or proposing alternative or ideal laws. In contrast, this article seeks to understand why legal and governance systems around the world have failed to respond to the climate crisis. It also explores the material condititon neceary for enacting a broad social change project. The objective of the article is to initiate a conversation with advocates of Wild Law about how we can move beyond thoery and engage in a collaborative project of ethical praxis.

Environmental law in Australia began formally with the passing of the Environmental Assessment Act by the Whitlam government in 1974. The underlying principle of wild law or Earth Jurisprudence is that the human law should be based on and respects the laws of nature. Unless the law is based on the values needed for a sustainable future, applying cosmetic changes to the legal system will be futile. At the level of global problems, denial of responsibility for cumulative impacts had been a common defence against legal attempts to restrain new projects that accelerate climate change. Climate change is the extreme example of the failure of current environmental law. Independent assessment of environmental impacts would be a major change for the better. Real consideration of future generations requires that one factor into their decision-marking the impact that their resource use will have on society in the future.

The development of an earth or wild jurisprudence requires us to interrogate from an ecological perspective the sacred texts of law, its regulatory instruments and its judgments, and to acknowledge some of the missing voices and perspectives: those belonging to other species and future generations and perhaps, even more holistically, the voice of Gaia herself. However in developing such a jurisprudence we need to do more than merely gesture towards the multiple silences and omissions. We need to provide constructive suggestions for a way forward. Wild law scholars strongly support the enactment of new legislation in which the rights of nature are enshrined. However regulatory reform will not, of itself, address judicial anthropocentrism. The Australian Wild Law Judgment project, which draws its inspiration from various feminist judgment projects, poses a unique critical challenge to the dominant human-centred focus of the common law. In participating in this project, a group of academics and practitioners will open up Australian judicial decision-making to critical scrutiny from a wild law perspective. In this article we describe feminist judgment re-writing projects, outline the development of the dynamic Australian Wild Law movement, introduce the Australian Wild Law judgment project, and highlight the project's parameters, limitations and, most importantly, its transformative possibilities.

The wild law judgment project is a recent exciting collaborative project involving the rewriting and writing of both existing and hypothetical judgments from a wild law or Earth-centred perspective. In this article, the author reflects upon the performative implications of judicial impersonation and writing and rewriting judgments wildly. The performative nature of the project makes it a valuable teaching resource, in that it thereby offers a different and arguably more powerful challenge to the anthropocentric bias in law than that contained in more conventional forms of academic critique. Drawing upon insights contributed by academics who have used rewritten feminist judgments in their teaching, the author explores the pedagogical value and possibilities in the collection of wild law judgments. In light of the dire existential crisis which currently confronts Earth and its diverse lifeforms, there is a solid argument for ensuring that such an 'outsider pedagogy' is effectively incorporated into the mainstream curriculum in law schools.

Wild law or Earth Jurisprudence is an emerging theory of law and governance that seeks to evolve law in a fashion that recognises our relationship to the broader Earth community. In this article, the author introduces and articulates some fundamental concepts being developed by theorists in this area. The author also discusses the recent constitutional amendment in Ecuador that granted nature the right to exist, persist and flourish.

The article does two things. First, it explores the emerging field of ecology and law through the examination of Earth Jurisprudence developed in the work of Berry, Cullinan, and Burdon. Second, it puts this Earth Jurisprudence and the emerging field of ecology and law in connection with the wide ranging philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari. Earth Jurisprudence and the emerging field of ecology and law are introduced through the exploration of four themes that characterise the field of study: a critique of the dominant western worldview and image of thought; a new philosophy of nature widely informed by contemporary science and cosmology; a new relation to the Earth and nature in affectual intensities, image of thinking, and investment of the social field; and, the realisation of the necessity and centrality of a fundamental reconceptualization of legality and governance. The Earth Jurisprudence of Berry, Cullinan, and Burdon (particularly Cullinan’s Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice) is then explored substantively in Cullinan’s reconceptualization of legality, the Grand Jurisprudence that informs Earth Jurisprudence, the Earth Jurisprudence of the promotion of mutual ecocentric human-Earth enhancement, the development of Earth rights, the reconceptualization of property and land, and the Wild Law that Earth Jurisprudence produces as the outcome of its creativity. Earth Jurisprudence and the emerging field of ecology and law are a far-reaching development within legal studies, with potentially profound implications for our contemporary conceptualisation of legality and governance and the creation of a concept of law for a new Earth. When put into connection with the wide ranging philosophical joint work of Deleuze and Guattari there emerge striking commonalities, convergences, and a common jurisprudential project of the creation of a legality for a new Earth. The article concludes with the argument that the work of Deleuze and Guattari could provide a key resource for the development of Earth Jurisprudence and the emerging field of ecology and law, particularly the Deleuze and Guattari jurisprudential concept of emergent law.

Book Abstract: Wild law is a groundbreaking approach to law that stresses human interconnectedness and dependence on nature. It critiques existing law for promoting environmental harm and seeks to establish a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. For the first time, this volume brings together voices fromt he leading proponents of wild law around the world. It introduces readers to the idea of wild law and considers its relationship to environmental law, the rights of nature, science, religion, property law and international governance.