Literature Review

Through a lens of legal pluralism, this article examines the histories, ontologies and discourses that have shaped two contrasting approaches to human-Earth relations in debates and legal frameworks for sustainable development. Anthropocentric discourses of nature as service-provider underpin the dominant approaches within ecology and economics. Ecocentric discourses of Nature as subject are reflected in Rights of Nature movements, particularly in the Americas, and at an international level, in the United Nations Harmony with Nature Programme. Drawing particularly on examples from forest governance in global and national contexts, this article analyses the ways in which international organisations and states have instrumentalised and embedded these discourses in law and policy and reflects on the challenges and possibilities for pluricultural legal orders, Rights of Nature and sustainable development. Moving away from conventional understandings of rights and entitlement to natural resources, the article argues for a deep legal pluralism that both decentres anthropocentric thinking on the environment and decentres the state in the development of Earth law. This places responsibility for the environment and the equitable sharing of power at the heart of legal frameworks on human-Earth relations and recognises the diversity of ontologies that shape these relationships in law and practice.

The purpose of the study is to analyze the environmental rights of citizens and guarantees of their protection. To achieve the results of the study a systematic approach and various scientific methods were applied, in particular: dialectical, formal-logical, comparative-legal. As a result of the conducted research, the interrelation between international environmental law and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights concerning environmental rights was considered. The study analyzed the development of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and concluded that the European Convention on Human Rights lacks a clear recognition of the right to a healthy environment. The importance of the environment for the realization of human rights has been proven to be widely recognized in international law. The assumption that a human right to a healthy environment can arise in international law raises a number of theoretical and practical problems for human rights, with such problems arising both within and outside the human rights debate. The quality of the natural environment has been found to affect the ability of governments to uphold numerous statutory human rights. The research concludes that human rights law can make a positive contribution to environmental protection, but the precise nature of the relationship between the environment and human rights requires a more critical and deeper analysis of environmental rights issues. The article analyzes the thesis regarding the guarantee of human rights to a safe environment.

By offering a solution to the environmental challenges of our day, Earth law may be the next great rights-based movement. The belief that non-human nature – including the species and ecosystems that comprise our world – has inherent rights has galvanized an international movement. Building on the breakthrough of three rivers securing rights recognition, Earth Law Center works on the front line by partnering with local communities to secure rights for rivers and wider ecosystems. Empowering nature also empowers communities because when advocates see themselves as rights defenders, the stakes are raised, and the relationships between people and the environment are transformed. Based on this background, this article explores the origins of Earth law, the importance of rivers, how Earth law can strengthen river protections and current river initiatives, and it also details how to get involved.

Humanity’s relationship with the Ocean needs to be transformed to effectively address the multitude of governance crises facing the Ocean, including overfishing, climate change, pollution, and habitat destruction. Earth law, including Rights of Nature, provides a pathway to center humanity as a part of Nature and transform our relationship from one of dominion and separateness towards holism and mutual enhancement. Within the Earth law framework, an Ocean-centered approach views humanity as interconnected with the Ocean, recognizes societies’ collective duty and reciprocal responsibility to protect and conserve the Ocean, and puts aside short-term gain to respect and protect future generations of all life and the Ocean’s capacity to regenerate and sustain natural cycles. This Essay presents Ocean-centered governance as an approach to help achieve the 10 challenges for collective impact put forward as part of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and therefore living in a harmonious relationship with the Ocean.

This article aims to compare Environmental Law in England with the established body of Earth Law which currently exists internationally. It provides an analysis of English Law as it applies to marine protection, environmental permitting and wildlife conservation and critically analyses whether they are doing enough to ensure a conservationist regime. Further, it explores the Earth Law movement and how it might influence and change the application of Environmental Law in England. Particular attention is paid to academics and writers such as Christopher Stone, Rachel Carson and Cormac Cullinan. Examining the shift we as human beings must take from an anthropocentric stance to one of ecocentric and biocentric beliefs in order to support the Earth.

The relationship between human rights and environmental protection in international law is far from simple or straightforward. A new attempt to codify and develop international law on this subject was initiated by the UNHRC in 2011. What can it say that is new or that develops the existing corpus of human rights law? Three obvious possibilities are explored in this article. First, procedural rights are the most important environmental addition to human rights law since the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. Any attempt to codify the law on human rights and the environment would necessarily have to take this development into account. Secondly, a declaration or protocol could be an appropriate mechanism for articulating in some form the still controversial notion of a right to a decent environment. Thirdly, the difficult issue of extra-territorial application of existing human rights treaties to transboundary pollution and global climate change remains unresolved. The article concludes that the response of human rights law – if it is to have one – needs to be in global terms, treating the global environment and climate as the common concern of humanity.

While the focus of earth system governance is on the human-social aspects of Earth system changes, law has played a peripheral part in the earth system governance scientific agenda. Earth system governance perspectives have also not significantly infiltrated the juridical domain. In this paper we seek to initiate a debate on the juridical dimensions of earth system governance. We make out a case in support of developing a new overarching legal phenomenon that, more than environmental law (among others) comprehensively accommodates and encapsulates the juridical aspects of earth system governance, including a new accompanying research agenda. We call this new legal phenomenon ‘earth system law’. Earth system law, as we aim to show, could introduce a new era in legal scholarship, while seeking to comprehensively respond to the regulatory challenges presented by a changing Earth system in the Anthropocene. For illustrative purposes, we provide a conceptual framework of earth system law by focusing on international environmental law. We show how core considerations of earth system law might set in motion some of the conceptual and regulatory changes required to eventually progress from international environmental law to a mature form of earth system law.

This article explores what the emerging paradigm of ‘Earth System Law’ suggests in terms of reconfigurations of the Earth, its subjects and the law. Which representations of the Earth and of its subjects does Earth System Law think with? And which human-nonhuman relations do these systemic reconceptualizations translate? While innovative in many regards when contraposed to international environmental law, Earth System Law's central novelty lies in its ‘systems-oriented ontology’. Yet, it is precisely this underpinning that deserves, I argue, more critical attention. While Earth System Law's rendering of the Earth system seems to embrace an ‘autopoietic’ understanding of how life-making and life-sustaining processes are enacted, its proposed functioning of a planetary Earth System Law and the systems approach that underlies it remain elusive. This article unpacks these tenets by suggesting that, instead of looking at the functioning of the Earth through autopoietic lenses, a ‘sympoietic’ view should be preferred to make sense of how life emerges and contingently unfolds on Earth, and leave space for collective modes of being, thinking and acting in the Anthropocene.

Book Summary: It is clear that international law is not yet equipped to handle the “ecological goods and services” that exist simultaneously within and outside of all states. The global commons have always been understood as geographical spaces that exist only outside the political borders of states. A vital good such as a stable climate exists both within and outside all states, and shows traditional legal approaches to be ecological nonsense. With the recent possibility of measuring and monitoring the state and functioning of the Earth System through the Planetary Boundaries framework, it is now possible to define a “Safe Operating Space of Humankind” corresponding to a biogeophysical state of Earth. In this sense, the Common Home of Humanity is not a planet with 510 million square kilometres, but is a specific favourable state of the Earth System. Recent major scientific advances anticipate a legal paradigm shift that could overcome the disconnection between ecological realities and existing legal frameworks. If we recognize this qualitative and non-geographic space as a Common Natural Intangible Heritage of Humankind, all positive and negative “externalities” end up being included within a new maintenance system of the Common Home.

Advocating a new form of leadership that places the health and well-being of people and the planet first, this book proposes a new Earth law, a framework for sustainable development and international environmental governance. As it argues that the planet is not the exclusive preserve of the executives of the world’s top corporations, this volume illustrates how the law can be the catalyst in a shift of attitude away from regarding the Earth as something to be owned and traded for profit. Detailed and passionate, this is a holistic approach to law, business, and the environment in the battle for the ecosystem.

I set out on this research concerned with human relations to the ecological world, and the role of law in these relationships. As one theory of nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) law and constitutionalism enables strong kinship relations between the nêhiyawak and non-human beings and things, I explore how nêhiyaw law can be revitalized to reconcile our land relationships. Wâhkôtowin, or the overarching principle that governs our relations, ensures that wellness and good living –miyo pimâtisiwin – is not only a human objective, but shared intersocietally with non-human relations and entities. This dissertation examines the constitutive role that four areas of Plains Cree livelihood – nêhiyaw âcimowina (narrative processes), nêhiyaw âskiy (Plains Cree territory and territoriality), nêhiyawewin (Plains Cree language) and nêhiyaw mamâhtâwiwina (Plains Cree ceremony) – play in ensuring such good living. Taking a ‘law as weaving’ approach’, these areas and institutions form a web to support kind relations to our environments and ecologies. Treaties provide an integral avenue to revitalize the uses of nêhiyaw law in our land relations. Canadian constitutionalism’s primary focus on human-to-human relations, without constitutional consideration of the agency of the ecological world, has had harmful effects on the wellness of non-human beings and things. When we apply the legal and constitutive principles within Plains Cree law and constitutionalism to Treaty 6, they obligate both the Crown and peoples within Canada in the same manner.

Book Sumary: Wild law is a groundbreaking approach to law that stresses human dependence on nature. For the first time, this volume brings together voices from the 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.