The Environmentalist Attack on Environmental Law

This essay reviews two books written by leading scholars that express profound dissatisfaction with the ability of environmental law to actually protect the environment. Mary Wood’s “Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age” calls for “deep change in environmental law,” emphasizing the roles that agency issuance of permits to modify the environment and excessive deference to agency decisions play in ongoing environmental destruction. Wood proposes a “Nature’s Trust” built on the public trust doctrine to empower courts to play a much more aggressive role in overseeing environmental decisionmaking. In “Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons,” Burns Weston and David Bollier identify the state/market alliance is the problem, and their solution is decentralized governance based on informal norms. Both books are especially effective in identifying the shortcomings in how environmental law actually operates today. But their proposed solutions are likely to fall short absent a more fundamental transformation on how we imagine the natural environment and humanity’s relationship to it. The public trust doctrine and the commons have been part of the fabric of the law for centuries, yet they have failed to accomplish the environmental goals that Wood, Weston, and Bollier hope to achieve now. And if we do experience a fundamental transformation in environmental thinking, then the existing environmental laws may finally fulfill their original purposes

Commoning and climate justice

Commoning represents a dynamic and emergent means of risk-reduction and livelihood provision which can address the shortcomings of both market and state-oriented economic systems -- increasingly relevant as climate change threatens human subsistence worldwide. This paper brings together international examples of responses to climate-related threats that are collective (not privatizing), to provide preliminary empirical evidence about how and in what circumstances people may develop equitable communal institutions rather than ones that worsen community fragmentation. The examples include traditional and new forms of commons which help to meet local subsistence needs and develop communities’ social, political and economic resilience in the face of climate change, exploring how climate justice -- improving the local and global equity of climate change impacts and processes – can advance in parallel with commons development.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, FRN IDRC and SSHRC File Agreement No. 2017-008

Building Commons Governance for a Greener Economy

Much recent work in ecological economics and political ecology, including calls for “de-growth” in the transition towards more sustainable economies, focuses on commons as a promising paradigm for sustainable governance institutions.  The vision involves people who depend on or have an interest in a resource or asset, working together co-operatively to use that asset for production, service provision, and exchange which creates value and well-being while integrating ecological care, justice, and long-term planning to the best of diverse communities’ abilities. This includes institutions such as co-ops, land trusts, and non-market or beyond-market collective ways of organizing production, distribution, consumption, and waste or materials management.Developing such collective institutions requires nurturing the skills and abilities needed to create and maintain them: empathy, communication and listening skills, a sense of shared purpose, creativity, dispute resolution across differences, long-term vision, environmental awareness and stewardship, among others. Transformative education praxis and transdisciplinarity facilitate the growth of these skills and abilities in children and adults, as Paulo Freire and other transformative learning practitioners have shown (Gadotti 2009; O’Sullivan 1999;Gutierrez & Prado 1998). Transformative pedagogy, including both eco-pedagogy and transdisciplinarity, is foundational as human society evolves institutions for sustainability such as commons.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Climate justice, commons, and degrowth

Economic inequality reduces the political space for addressing climate change, by producing fear-based populism. Only when the safety, social status, and livelihoods of all members of society are assured will voluntary, democratic decisions be possible to reverse climate change and fairly mitigate its effects. Socio-environmental and climate justice, commoning, and decolonization are pre-conditions for participatory, responsible governance that both signals and assists the development of equitable socio-political systems. Degrowth movements, when they explicitly prioritize equity, can help to focus activism for climate justice and sustainable livelihoods. This paper overviews the theoretical grounding for these arguments, drawing from the work of ecofeminist and Indigenous writers. Indigenous (and also ecofeminist) praxis is grounded in activists' leadership for commoning and resistance to extraction, the fossil fuel economy, and commodified property rights. These movements are building a politics of decolonization, respect, solidarity, and hope rather than xenophobia and despair.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

THE DEATH RATTLE OF OPEN ACCESS AND THE ADVENT OF PROPERTY RIGHTS REGIMES IN FISHERIES

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Forest Land Ownership Changes in Portugal

Publisher PD

The Environmentalist Attack on Environmental Law

Reviewing Burns H. Weston & David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Laws of the Commons; and Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age

Green criminology: shining a critical lens on environmental harm

Green criminology provides for inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary engagement with environmental crimes and wider environmental harms. Green criminology applies a broad ‘‘green’’ perspective to environmental harms, ecological justice, and the study of environmental laws and criminality, which includes crimes affecting the environment and non-human nature. Within the ecological justice and species justice perspectives of green criminology there is a contention that justice systems need to do more than just consider anthropocentric notions of criminal justice, they should also consider how justice systems can provide protection and redress for the environment and other species. Green criminological scholarship has, thus, paid direct attention to theoretical questions of whether and how justice systems deal with crimes against animals and the environment; it has begun to conceptualize policy perspectives that can provide contemporary ecological justice alongside mainstream criminal justice. Moving beyond mainstream criminology’s focus on individual offenders, green criminology also explores state failure in environmental protection and corporate offending and environmentally harmful business practices. A central discussion within green criminology is that of whether environmental harm rather than environmental crime should be its focus, and whether green ‘‘crimes’’ should be seen as the focus of mainstream criminal justice and dealt with by core criminal justice agencies such as the police, or whether they should be considered as being beyond the mainstream. This article provides an introductory overview that complements a multi- and inter-disciplinary article collection dedicated to green criminological thinking and research

Covenants, Constitution & Commons: International, constitutional and community responses to achieve access to sufficient water for everyone

This thesis considers how best to achieve access to sufficient water for everyone in South Africa. It encompasses international law, national (including constitutional) law and policy, and finally community organisation, and the ‘vernacular law’ of the commons. The task of achieving sustainable access to sufficient water for everyone in South Africa is long-standing and considerable, culminating in the inclusion of a right of access to sufficient water in the 1996 Constitution. This right has simultaneously provided an overarching moral framework (through the elaboration of relevant human rights norms), while remaining decidedly remote from the experience of many people, for whom insufficient water remains a daily reality. Here, the ability of a right to water to effectively ensure access to sufficient water for everyone is critiqued. In so doing, the practical and conceptual limits of ‘rights-talk’ are considered, in two contexts in particular: International human rights law; and the jurisprudence of the South African Constitutional Court. Crucial to this thesis is a methodology of narrative inquiry, which analyses the stories of people who suffer from access to insufficient water, revealing the disconnection between people’s right to water, and their experience of living without the water they need. Flowing from this narrative is an attempt to reconceive water governance from outside the structural and conceptual closures of the dominant paradigm (characterised by individual rights and commodification) and to explore the potential for alternative practical modes of governance to deliver greater sustainability and equity, for communities living with water poverty. In this thesis, through a blend of contemporary perspectives on vernacular law and multi-level governance, postmodern theories on stories and subjectivity, and empirical observation, a fresh contribution is made to the debate on access to water in South Africa. Key words: Water, South Africa, (Human) Rights, Sustainable Development, Anthropocene, Narrative inquiry, Constitutional Court, Constitutionalism, Commodification, Reasonablenes