Literature Review

Global momentum is building to achieve net zero in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—and to do so more quickly than previously envisioned. Getting there will require unprecedented levels of innovation. While a fast-rising number of companies and governments are committing themselves to ambitious net-zero goals, most focus the strategy exclusively on emissions and expect the necessary technologies and solutions to become available as needed.

For public health, having safe drinking water is important. However, conventional ways of disinfection have their own environmental issues. Although chlorine is low-cost and simple to use in centralized water systems, it comes at the cost of toxic chemical byproducts.

In 2021, ASTHO convened state environmental health directors (SEHDs) and directors of public health preparedness to discuss innovations developed during the COVID-19 pandemic such as virtual inspections. This brief explores how state health and partner agencies developed these methods to support environmental health work and how they are continuing to adapt them moving forward.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found a way to use small shocks of electricity to disinfect water, reducing energy consumption, cost, and environmental impact. The technology could be integrated into the electric grid or even powered by batteries.

Across Africa, a network of Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners is accompanying traditional and indigenous communities in the revival and enhancement of their Earth-centred customary governance systems. In Kenya, Uganda, Benin, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and Cameroon, communities are reviving traditional knowledge and practices, restoring sacred natural sites and associated rituals, re-establishing indigenous seed diversity and food sovereignty, and strengthening ecological governance systems derived from the laws of the Earth.

Due to public concern and the need to protect citizens' health from impacts of environmental degradation, the European Union has over the past decades established an extensive framework of thematic programmes, strategic objectives and regulatory actions that are related to environment and health.

The claim that in natural resource management (NRM) a change from anthropocentric values and ethics to eco-centric ones is necessary to achieve sustainability leads to the search for eco-centric models of relationship with the environment. Indigenous cultures can provide such models; hence, there is the need for multicultural societies to further include their values in NRM. In this article, we investigate the environmental values placed on a freshwater environment of the Wet Tropics by a community of indigenous Australians. We discuss their environmental values as human values, and so as beliefs that guide communities’ understanding of how the natural world should be viewed and treated by humans.

Currently, there is no non-anthropocentric guide to the practice of nature conservation and the treatment of invasive species and domestic animals. In examining the so-called ‘ecocentric’ and ‘animal’ ethics, we highlight some differences between them, and argue that the basic aspiration for support of all nonhuman life needs to be retained. We maintain that hierarchies of value need to be flexible, establishing basic principles and then weighing up the options in the context of anthropocentrism, industrial development and human population growth. Acknowledging the role of these conditions creates space for combining individual-based and collective-based ethics in practice.

In reshaping the human understanding of killer whales and other wild species, Tahlequah was, in a sense, simply carrying on a family tradition. Jason Colby, a historian at the University of Victoria who spoke at the conference calls the southern residents probably the most influential cetaceans in human history.” For the past 60 years, he said, they have helped reframe cultural values, environmental politics, and scientific practices in the Salish Sea and beyond.”

Earth Law: Emerging Ecocentric Law—A Guide for Practitioners is a book for students and practicing lawyers who seek to preserve a habitable planet and question whether current environmental law is sufficient for the task. Earth law is the emerging body of ecocentric law for protecting, restoring, and stabilizing the functional interdependency of Earth’s life and life-support systems. Earth law may be expressed in constitutional, statutory, common law, and customary law, as well as in treaties and other agreements both public and private. It is a rapidly developing field in many nations, municipalities, Indigenous communities, and international institutions. This course of study is for students and lawyers who know that nature and human environmental rights need to have seats at the table of law—in courts, legislatures, administrative bodies, enforcement agencies, and civil society.

Granting the ocean legal rights would be a step toward “a more ecocentric value system,” Crespo says, “which is still upheld by innumerous coastal and Indigenous peoples across the ocean. These communities recognize the intrinsic right that the ocean and its many species and features have to exist and be protected.”

The question I address in this article is whether and to which extent the ecosystem approach is a manifestation of an ecocentric turn in international environmental law; or whether the new language of ecosystems remains contained within a legal ordering still expression of more outdated ontologies of humanity and nature. I first explore the structural ambiguities implicated by both ecology and the concept of ecosystem; then I explore ecocentric and anthropocentric articulations of the ecosystem approach; and finally, I try to assess which articulation prevails in selected areas of international environmental law.