Environment - Biopolitics -

Anthropocene
Western Legal Thought
 Environmental Law

• Central Aim: protection of the natural environment from the negative

consequences of human activities.

• Emerged in late 1960s and early 1970s

• Environmental legislation: both domestic and international level

• How successful? the overall state of environment is deteriorating.

 Environmental Law
• Some examples of environmental legislation in the UK:
• The Control of Pollution Act 1974 — covers issues of air, noise, water and atmospheric pollution.
• Environmental Protection Act 1974 — controls waste management and emissions in environment
• Hunting Act 2004 — Prohibited use of dogs to hunt foxes, hare and mink.
• Climate Change Act 2008 — Designed to reduce carbon dioxide emission in the UK.
• Energy Act 2011 — Requires energy providers to meet certain energy efficiency standards when
providing energy to customers.

• Environment Act 2021 — Aims to improve air and water quality, protect wildlife, increase
recycling, and reduce plastic waste.
• Environmental Law - Contradiction

• Attempting to find solutions to environmental problems…

• …but is imbricated within prevailing philosophical and legal paradigm

that is creating these problems in the first place!

• Separation between human and nature (environment)

• Modern obsession with centre: a human centre (an anthropocentric

value system)
 Critical Environmental Law
• Critical environmental law: an enquiry into the theoretical and
institutional apparatus of both environmental law and the rationality of
environmentalism

• Employing Foucault’s method of genealogy

• (genealogy: the study and tracing of lines of descent)

• Aim of genealogy: Reconstruction of the contingencies and contestations

constituting the complex history of (legal) concepts
• Genealogy does not search for a single point of origin.

• In genealogical approach, everything is the result of ‘play of forces’.

• Every concept, understood genealogically, is the result of an ensemble of

competing forces, each trying to assert hegemony.

• With the use of a genealogical approach, the binary “anthropocentrism vs.

ecocentrism” can be avoided!

• Because environmental law is complex, non-linear, utterly conflictual, and

ultimately irreducibly genealogical.
 Why biopolitics?

• Two reasons:

• Power no longer operates in term of a sovereign command

• The environment (the nature) is no longer simply an object of sovereign

exploitation.
 Biopolitics of the Environment

• Protection, regularisation, and optimisation of nature itself.

• The double goal: conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity

• The environment is subjected to series of positive interventions that aim at

its care, at fostering, and optimising its processes, and at the same time
at the enhancement of its productive forces.
 Anthropocene

• (Fields of geology and earth system sciences)

• Geologist divide planetary history into various segments (eras, epochs,

ages) that denote periods of relative stability within the earth’s climate.

• A new geological epoch: Anthropocene!

From Holocene to Anthropocene
• The Holocene: Benign climatic conditions that allowed growth of
agriculture and the flourishing of human civilisation.

• Started with the end of the last ice age.

• Lasted about 11,700 years.

• But now..!
From Holocene to Anthropocene
• The Anthropocene: The Holocene’s period of stability has ended.

• Much debate about the idea that has not settled upon a definition.

• But denotes radical current disruptions taking place within the planet.

• The actions of modern man — over the course of 200 years — have
diverted the course of planetary history.

• Contributory factors: contemporary world economy, global populations…

 The Anthropocene

• Disrupts commonplace assumptions:

• Social vs Natural Domains

• How does Western philosophy and theory think about the NATURE?

• Nature is out there, obeys natural laws that are indifferent to human
intervention (e.g. gravity, evolution etc.)

• Nature as a backdrop or stage for human social life.

• How does Western philosophy and theory think about the SOCIETY?

• Social sciences and humanities are exclusively concerned with human

dramas that take place agains natural scenography.

• Human-made phenomena

• Human-to-human networks subject to conscious decisions detached

from the natural world.
 The Anthropocene
• The Anthropocene disrupts the binary social vs nature approach by

showing that…

• … the organisation of society has a profound impact on nature’s deep

structures.
• As a result of this impact:

• The ‘natural backdrop’ to our human dramas has suddenly become

highly mobile and reactive, not neatly as stable or as indifferent to our
actions as we once thought.
Anthropocene and Environmental Law

• In legal scholarship:

• Questions or issues of environment were thought to be the preserve of

environmental law.

• But the issues of Anthropocene are much broader…

• … and as such requires a rethinking of relations between legal

concepts, traditions, institutions, practices, and ecological and
geological forces.
 Issues of the Anthropocene
• Fossil fuel consumption
• Deforestation: Meat consumption and palm oil production
• Carbon emissions and the green gas effect
• Economy (and international and national politics that sustains the
economic order)
• Question of capitalism
• Relations between developed and developing countries - Globalisation
• (Global) Equality
• (Global) Welfare
 History of Modern Law

• The Anthropocene is rooted in the history of capitalist social relations.

• Massive increase in fossil fuel consumption:

• Beginning in the late 18th century

• Accelerating dramatically in mid-20th century

 The Role of the Law
• Is law implicated in processes of production, extraction and pollution?

• Does law — property law, law of corporations, legal personality, tortious liability
— help to facilitate, obscure, or resist processes that destabilise the climate?

• Does law embed a form of anthropocentrism within social life through

distribution of responsibilities?

• Does the ‘age of rights’ play a role in this anthropocentrism — promoting an

idea of human as disarticulated from the ecological relations on which we
depend?
 Nature / Culture
• Within Western philosophy one encounters the disparity between nature
and culture:

• Natural environment as something to be exploited and controlled…

• …rather than cared for and respected.

• We encountered similar approaches in Hobbes’ and Locke’s thoughts as

well as colonialist attitudes (especially, for the latter, when we studied
post-colonial and critical race theories).
• Examples:

• Historical imposition of Western property regimes on indigenous land

and communities in the context of colonialism

• Exploitation of environment in the name of ‘business efficacy’,

‘economic growth’, or bourgeois conception of ‘freedom’

• Public law: territorial jurisdiction, popular sovereignty, right to non-

intervention.
 Theoretical Innovations
• Basic rights of nature?

• Balancing the rights of non-human animals or ecosystems with

humans?

• Should we stop privileging the rights of humans?

• Is the goal of ‘ecological integrity’ meaningful, let alone amenable to

legal reasoning?
• Examples of ‘rights of nature’ and legal personality to nonhuman persons
• New Zealand
• Recognition of legal personality of Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River) — rights of the
river can be represented and defended

• Buenos Aires, 2014

• Court accepted Sandra, an orangutan, had basic rights of a ‘nonhuman person’
and was ordered to be released from the zoo.

• Manhattan Supreme Court, 2015

• Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees, were granted the right to seek habeas corpus
against unlawful imprisonment.
 Rethinking the Social

• Social & Society

• A matter of ‘geo-social’ or ‘socio-ecological’ relations

• Social life is not merely separated from nature but is embedded in

reactive and dynamic relations with ecological and geological forces.

• Rethinking the context within which law is situated…

• Rethinking the context within which law is situated…

• Law: not a hermetically sealed bubble of ‘black letter’ rules and

regulations

• Law: Embedded in social, cultural, political, and economical contexts.

• Law emerges from more-than-human networks, and is deeply entwined

not only with social life but also with ecological and geological forces.