Short description:

This handbook provides a critical survey into the function of law and governance during a time period when humans have power to impact the Earth system.

Long description:

The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene provides a critical survey into the function of law and governance during a time when humans have the power to impact the Earth system.

The Anthropocene is a ?crisis of the earth system.? This book addresses its implications for law and legal thinking in the twenty-first century. Unpacking the challenges of the Anthropocene for advocates of ecological law and politics, this handbook pursues a range of approaches to the scientific fact of anthropocentrism, with contributions from lawyers, philosophers, geographers, and environmental and political scientists. Rather than adopting a hubristic normativity, the contributors engage methods, concepts, and legal instruments in a way that underscores the importance of humility and an expansive ethical worldview. Contributors to this volume are leading scholars and future leaders in the field. Rather than upholding orthodoxy, the handbook also problematizes received wisdom and is grounded in the conviction that the ideas we have inherited from the Holocene must all be open to question.

Engaging such issues as the Capitalocene, Gaia theory, the rights of nature, posthumanism, the commons, geoengineering, and civil disobedience, this handbook will be of enormous interest to academics, students, and others with interests in ecological law and the current environmental crisis.

"This book opens up along a new horizon of what Anthropocene might mean for human juridical responsibility. Exceptionally interdisciplinary, this is a tapestry of perspectives that eschews romanticisation and remains critical throughout, reaching back to the indigenous roots of first laws and extending to new takes on geoengineering. This is a truly planetary book and perhaps its main lesson is this: that human exceptionalism must and can be translated into human responsibilisation with regards to our planet. If you want to find the tools to do this, read this book." Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster Law & Theory Lab, London 

"Burdon and Martel have brought us an exciting and diverse collection of interdisciplinary essays that address today?s most urgent and critical questions. The authors marshal a strikingly wide range of conceptual resources, inspiring us to reimagine the human and the rules by which we live. It is abounding in creativity when we most need it!" Hasana Sharp, McGill University, Canada

Table of Contents:

Contributors

1 The Problem with Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene Epoch: Reimagining International Environmental Law?s Mantra Principle Through Ubuntu

2 The Sovereign Order of Ti?a: Enduring Traditions of Earth Jurisprudence in Africa

3 The Super-Factual Anthropocene and Encounters with Indigenous Law

Kirsten Anker and Mark Antaki

4 The Anthropocene Archive: Human and Inhuman Subjects and Sediments

5 We, Earthbound People: Constituent Power in Entangled Times

Daniel Matthews

6 Chastened Humanism and/or Necrotic Anthropocene: Transcendence toward Less

7 Biodiversity: The Neglected Lens for Reimagining Property, Responsibility, and Law for the Anthropocene

8 The Law of the Sea: Oceans, Ships, and the Anthropocene

9 Ocean Acidification and the Anthropocene: An Emergency Response

10 Outer Space in the Anthropocene

11 Taming Gaia 2.0: Earth System Law in the Ruptured Anthropocene

12 Collapse or Sustainability?: Ecological Integrity as a Fundamental Norm of Law

13 Making Ecological Integrity Human-Inclusive in the Anthropocene

14 The Anthropocene and Human Rights: A New Context and the Need to Revisit Collective Human Concerns

15 Dignity in the Anthropocene

Erin Daly and Dina Lupin

16 Regulating Nature and the Rule of Law

17 Solar Geoengineering and the Challenge of Governing Multiple Risks in the Anthropocene

18 The Transformative Power of Receptivity: Building a Smart Political Energy Grid in Response to Planetary Ecological Crisis

19 Imagined Utopias

20 Myth for the Anthropocene

21 The Nomos of Creativity in the Anthropocene

22 Learning Ecological Law: Innovating Legal Curriculum and Pedagogy

23 Law, Responsibility, and the Capitalocene: In Search of New Arts of Living