Literature Review

This paper blends conservation science with legal and policy analysis to assess the primary threats to global shark populations and explores innovative approaches to conservation building upon the philosophy of Earth law, including the Rights of Nature legal framework. Using a case study of Panamá’s national Rights of Nature law, this paper highlights approaches to improve the protection and restoration of shark populations and their habitats. By examining the ecological, social, and economic aspects of conservation holistically, this study offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the urgency for shark protection and presents Rights of Nature as a valuable approach to shark conservation, with potential applications to other species globally.

Earth System Law has been proposed as an alternative conceptual framework to animate and support more adequate legal responses to planetary change. The emerging Earth System Law literature has sketched the contours of this new legal paradigm and reflected on its implications for the legal scholarly community. However, to date, less attention has been paid to the challenges of harnessing the transformative potential of Earth System Law; that is, its promise to evolve from a theoretically innovative perspective to facilitating positive, on-the-ground change. In this paper, we therefore ask: Which issues and questions will the Earth System Law research community have to engage with to ensure that Earth System Law is able to initiate and drive the processes of transformative change which it purports to support? And, which starting points can we identify for productively engaging with these issues? Responding to these questions, we articulate a theory-to-practice agenda which sets out departure points for working towards Earth System Law finding resonance in practice.

Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in the Andean-Amazonian foothills of Colombia. It is critical to probe new analytical frameworks that integrate other-than-human beings within legal institutions and decision-making protocols in this region. Such an approach weaves together various fields of knowledge and world-making practices that include—but are not limited to—Indigenous legal traditions, ecological law, multispecies ethnography, and ecological economics. My dissertation discusses how human and other-than-human beings such as medicinal plants and what Indigenous peoples in Southwestern Colombia call the “invisible ones” (los invisibles) co-create legal protocols and institutions. Furthermore, it studies the conceptual openings, methodological challenges, and ethical conundrums of this approach for the broader Earth Law movement, particularly the rights of nature. What happens when we consider forms of agency beyond symbolic and multicultural frameworks in legal theory and practice? How does a law that emerges from plant-human-“invisible” peoples’ entanglements challenge concepts of justice, agency, and value in times of socio-ecological transitions? How do forests become legal agents through different sets of territorial practices? My dissertation combines a multi-sited ethnography and a post-humanist approach in anthropology, law, and decision-making theory to study the entangled lives of law and ecology in the regions of Nariño and Putumayo, as well as the potential contributions of this framework towards a post-anthropocentric legal theory. In conversations with biologists, Indigenous practitioners from the Cofán and the Inga communities, legal scholars, and medicinal plants, particularly Yoco (Paullinia yoco) and Yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi), Legal Lives looks at how legal institutions emerge from the fabric of human and other-than-human forms of agency. This relational approach is at the core of the Earth Law movement and the radical paradigm shift it proposes for legal theory and practice in Latin America and beyond. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first one (I. Towards a Law Otherwise) offers an ethnographic approach to the law and comprises two chapters on the relationship between medicinal plants and legal protocols. Moreover, it includes three sub-chapters with the name of three different plants where I discuss the implications of vegetal agencies for socio-legal thought in the Andean-Amazonian region today. To further explore the connections between other-thanhumans and the law, chapter 2 (“Los Invisibles”) focuses on the making of an ethnobotanical research protocol with humans, plants, and what members of the Cofán community in the regions of Nariño and Putumayo refer to as the “invisible people” (los invisibles). Thus, Towards a Law Otherwise provides an ethnographic and conceptual basis to support the theoretical claims of the second part of the dissertation, namely: The Rights of Nature: Limits and Possibilities. Part II addresses some of the conceptual limits and political possibilities of the Rights of Nature in Latin America in the context of an emerging Earth Law movement. By attending to the social and legal worlds of other-than-human beings introduced in the first part of the dissertation, Rights of Nature proposes to reimagine fundamental premises of social and legal sciences at present, namely, (a) the idea that the law is primarily symbolic or propositional; (b) the notion that rights and responsibilities are commensurable across different legal cultures and cosmologies (Ch. 3 “Conjuring”), and that (c) the concept of legal personhood is fundamental for legal redress (Ch. 4 “Forest on trial”). Part II, a contribution to a relational theory of legal agency, therefore critically assesses core notions of Western law such as legal personhood, standing, rights and responsibilities. The third and final part of the dissertation (III. Rhizomatic Agencies) reviews and summarizes the argument concerning agency and discusses how parts I and II could serve as tools for legal transformation in concrete scenarios of learning and judicial decision-making. A summary of agency theory with ethnographic insights from the first section, chapter 5 (“Agency Scaffolding”) dives into the limits of individual and collective forms of agency and explores the possibility of plural and rhizomatic agencies that include other-than-human beings in decisionmaking protocols. Chapter 6 (“Worlding with Indigenous Law: A teaching and learning proposal”) can be considered as coursework material concerning Indigenous legalities. It refers to a specific Indigenous legal tradition—the Inga—as it transforms State law, while contributing with an emerging global Earth Law movement. The dissertation closes with a syllabus on “Indigenous legal traditions: from the Boreal to the Amazonian forests” (Chapter 7).

Book Summary: This book increases the visibility, clarity and understanding of ecological law. Ecological law is emerging as a field of law founded on systems thinking and the need to integrate ecological limits, such as planetary boundaries, into law. Presenting new thinking in the field, this book focuses on problem areas of contemporary law including environmental law, property law, trusts, legal theory and First Nations law and explains how ecological law provides solutions. Written by ecological law experts, it does this by 1) providing an overview of shortcomings of environmental law and other areas of contemporary law, 2) presenting specific examples of these shortcomings, 3) explaining what ecological law is and how it provides solutions to the shortcomings of contemporary law, and 4) showing how society can overcome some key challenges in the transition to ecological law. Drawing on a diverse range of case study examples including Indigenous law, ecological restoration and mining, this volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers of environmental and ecological law and governance, political science, environmental ethics and ecological and degrowth economics.

This chapter describes the comparative legal implications of Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence by acknowledging the country which the paper is written and in which it is being read. It reminds the reader that the concept of country is a varied and multifaceted one. The chapter focuses on Indigenous worldviews and legal perspectives, given the specific place that they are awarded within the emerging discourse of Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence. Indigenous peoples and their worldviews have occupied a special position within the emerging discourse of Earth Jurisprudence from the very beginning. The relevance of Indigenous worldviews to the project of an Ecological Jurisprudence, both in a practical as well as a theoretical sense is certainly as uncontroversial. Advocates of Earth Jurisprudence suggest and promote an important dialogue with and among all cultures in regard to the way in which collective species, engage with the environment, with particular emphasis on a dialogue involving Indigenous voices.

This chapter argues that emerging rights of nature theory, legal instruments and jurisprudence express qualities of Earth system law (ESL) and, reciprocally, that nature rights can illuminate critical questions about the values and normative orientations of ESL. It provides a brief overview of the rights of nature doctrine and the emergence of nature rights law around the world. The chapter explores three normative themes that are pivotal to emerging conceptions of ESL: promoting an eco-centric approach; embracing complexity, broadly construed; and adopting a planetary perspective. It sketches out a range of ways in which the rights of nature both express these objectives and point the way towards sustainable, adapted law for the Anthropocene. It argues that a further task in developing ESL should be to interrogate the concept of the Anthropocene, and that the rights of nature doctrine can facilitate this critical engagement by its example of normative positioning around this concept.

Ratified in 2019, the Nibi Declaration of Treaty #3 voices the relationship with water (Nibi) and jurisdictional responsibility that all Anishinaabe citizens have within the Treaty #3 territory. It affirms the responsibilities and relationships that others living within the territory should have with the water and ensures that the spirit of Nibi is central to decision-making and water governance. This article details the process of developing The Declaration, in accordance with the Treaty #3 lawmaking process and, which was driven by women, in ceremony, with the help of Gitiizii m-inaanik, and with the input of The Nation as a whole. This process embodies nationhood, sovereignty, and Anishinaabe jurisdiction as it relates to the environment and water, in accordance with the Manito Aki Inakonigaawin (Mother Earth law). Every person has a relationship with water. The process of nurturing that relationship through the teachings exemplified in the implementation of The Declaration will provide clarity on the responsibilities and partnerships that must be developed to protect the water for future generations.

This paper looks at future conservation goals for the ocean and whether these are enough to provide effective change.

In February 2021 a draft Declaration of the Rights of the Moon was posted on the website of the Australian Earth Law Alliance (AELA). The Declaration affirms that the Moon “is a sovereign natural entity in its own right” possessing “fundamental rights, which arise from its existence in the universe” (Australian Earth Law Alliance, 2021). The conversations that resulted in the Declaration included voices from law, ethics, archaeology, economics and ecology. It has been a consciously inclusive, interdisciplinary conversation. The Declaration is deliberately framed as a “draft” intended to initiate a global discussion. In this paper I will contribute a religious voice to the discussion, a Christian voice. I will outline the way recent themes in Christian theology resonate with the discussion around the Declaration.

Despite a proliferation of environmental law in the United States and around the world, the health of the natural world continues to deteriorate. In this paper, we will build on the idea that what we need is not more environmental law, but different approaches to managing human relationships with the Earth. We will argue that the burgeoning Earth jurisprudence movement offers a deep philosophical anchor and a range of practical and multi-disciplinary approaches necessary to create law reform and societal change that will better support the natural world and human societies than our current system. We will also suggest that one of the greatest strengths of Earth jurisprudence is its ability to combine a rational critique of some of our oldest western, legal, and governance structures, with a less rational and more emotive call to return to a sacred appreciation of the Earth and the wider Earth Community. In Section II, we will outline the origins and key elements of the Earth jurisprudence movement and will demonstrate the ways that Earth jurisprudence can be used to offer a cohesive framework within which law, politics, science, economics, ethics, traditional wisdom and human spirituality can be woven together to create a more effective governance approach to nurturing the Earth. In Section III, we will explore some of the ways groups inspired by Earth laws have implemented their work. Next, we will provide an overview of the work being carried out by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, an international network of lawyers and Earth Advocates.Finally, we will focus on the work of the Center for Earth Jurisprudence (CEJ) and the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA) as further examples of the innovative approaches being carried out by advocates for Earth jurisprudence.