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Promoting Human Attachment to Place in Ecological Law
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Many centuries before Columbus, the Norse peoples of Scandinavia colonized parts of Western Europe as well as the Northern Atlantic islands: the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and for at least a few years, Newfoundland. This was part of a larger process whose eastern half effected what today is Russia and was at least in part a response to wider Eurasian phenomenon. This chapter will concentrate on the North Atlantic portion of this story with an emphasis on how the archaeology of the settlement period (c. 800–1000 CE), the medieval period (c. 1000–1500 CE), and the postmedieval period (c. 1500–1800) has altered older narratives that sought to explain this early medieval colonial effort as well as created new narratives. A number of key sites in each of the North Atlantic will be discussed and put into a larger archaeological and historical context. In terms of the content of this volume, this chapter will present an earlier colonial phenomenon that was driven by many of the same variables that affected the post-Columbian Americas such as the commodification of natural resources and long-range trade, elite sponsored colonization, and the maintenance of power in the face of novel and unfamiliar conditions. In conclusion, the chapter will discuss the archaeology of the influence of the post-Columbian world on these medieval North Atlantic colonies.
The rule of ecological law is a fitting complement to degrowth. Planetary boundaries of safe operating space for humanity, along with complementary measures and principles, provide scientific and ethical foundations of the rule of ecological law, which should have several reinforcing features. First, it should recognize humans are part of Earth's life systems. Second, ecological limits must have primacy over social and economic regimes. Third, the rule of ecological law must permeate all areas of law. Fourth, it should focus on radically reducing material and energy throughput. Fifth, it must be global, but distributed, using the principle of subsidiarity. Sixth, it must ensure fair sharing of resources among present and future generations of humans and other life. Seventh, it must be binding and supranational, with supremacy over sub-global legal regimes as necessary. Eighth, it requires a greatly expanded program of research and monitoring. Ninth, it requires precaution about crossing global ecological boundaries. Tenth, it must be adaptive. Although the transition from a growth-insistent economy headed toward ecological collapse to an economy based on the rule of ecological law is elusive, the European Union may be a useful structural model.
This article seeks to describe sustainable development in operational terms for three different modes of production. It provides two theoretical concepts to characterize each society's relationship with nature: societal metabolism and colonization. Metabolism is the mode in which societies organize the exchange of matter and energy with their natural environment. Colonization refers to the strategies employed to transform parts of the natural environment to render them more useful for societal needs. The first section offers an exploration of the sustainability problems within three modes of production and social organization: hunter‐gatherer, agricultural, and industrial societies. Metabolism and colonization are then empirically described in detail for industrial societies. The final section discusses strategies for industrial societies to reduce and transform their metabolism toward more sustainable development.
Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, is home to the first civilizations in the Middle East. Dependent on
the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Mesopotamian civilizations, including those led by Hammurabi, Dadusha, Nebuchadnezzar,
developed a system of communal canals and irrigation works and a legal framework to govern these works. For all their legal
developments Mesopotamians left a dearth of written water law. For example, of Hammurabi's 282 laws only four deal with water.
However these laws established a regime for liability, they also aimed at restoring the injured party to his former position.
This article presents a tool for developing novel law and governance systems that support a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. Contemporary legal systems support perpetual economic growth, which underlies critical challenges in the human-Earth relationship. Fostering a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship in a limits-insistent systems framework is a more desirable overarching goal. Because law is a complex adaptive system that evolves with other systems, a systems-based assessment methodology can reveal the extent to which barriers to a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship in law and governance and related systems are locked in and enduring elements of such a relationship are locked out. Assessments of the degree of lock-in/lock-out can support development of strategies and priorities for shifting law and governance toward a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship. This approach integrates leverage points for changing systems behavior and acknowledges path dependence that limits future possibilities. Relevant metrics and indicators are grounded in how human manipulation of material and energy affects Earth's life support systems. Adaptiveness, rigorous monitoring and caution against crossing systems thresholds are central elements in this assessment framework. Additional policy-oriented research using this framework would help show how to progress toward a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship.
In this chapter, we enquire how and why our society arrived at the point of monetary valuation, and the following contractualisation and commodification of natural functioning of ecosystems. We undertake a study of how much an economic valuation of ecosystems is encouraged and imposed in and through a broader neo-classical economics vision of nature and biodiversity. This study aims at answering the following central question: how the interests of nature could be (re-)thought and represented beyond the economic valuation of ecosystems, if at all?
Contemporary theory of international politics faces a twofold problem: the critical engagement with legacies of national power politics in connection to 20th Century International Relations and the regeneration of notions of humanity. This book contributes to this engagement by a genealogy of thoughts on war, peace, and ethics.
Carbon dioxide emissions are rising so fast that some scientists are seriously considering putting Earth on life support as a last resort. But is this cure worse than the disease?
The Supreme Court has decided seventeen cases arising under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the government has not only won every case, but won almost all of them unanimously. Commentators routinely cite the drubbing that environmentalists have received in NEPA cases as evidence of the Court's hostility toward environmental law and environmentalism. But a close look at the cases, extending beyond what appears in the U.S. Reports, suggests a very different and more nuanced story. First, as revealed by the written briefs and oral arguments of the advocates and by the internal deliberations of the Justices in those cases, the government's "perfect record" came at a significant cost: the Solicitor General abandoned many lower court arguments and made major concessions about NEPA's requirements. Consequently, the Court's rulings frequently included language that favored environmentalists in future litigation. Indeed, in some instances, the NEPA plaintiffs won more than they lost. Second, the NEPA cases underscore the difference that skilled advocacy makes on either side of the lectern by the advocates before the Court and by the Justices during the Court's own internal deliberations. The significance of a Court opinion turns on the particular wording of its reasoning far more than on whether it ends with an "affirmed" or "reversed." And the better advocates before and within the Court are exceedingly effective at shaping that reasoning. In NEPA cases, the Solicitor General has generally outlitigated NEPA plaintiffs, and, within the Court, no Justice was more influential than Justice, and later Chief Justice, William Rehnquist. NEPA's story before the Supreme Court is, therefore, not a happy one for NEPA enthusiasts, but the story is not nearly as dismal as routinely supposed. The Justices may have been unappreciative of NEPA's potential, but they have not been systematically hostile to its requirements. To the extent, moreover, that NEPA precedent has been less rather than more favorable to NEPA plaintiffs, much of this is best explained by the Solicitor General's comparative strategic and expertise advantage before the Court and Chief Justice Rehnquist's heightened skills on the bench compared to those, like Justice William Douglas, who were more sympathetic to NEPA's mandate.
This revised edition of Carolyn's Merchant's classic Reinventing Eden has been updated with a new foreword and afterword. Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western Culture. This book traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations and offers a bold new way to think about the earth.
Most ecosystems are now sufficiently altered in structure and function to qualify as novel systems, and this recognition should be the starting point for ecosystem management efforts. Under the emerging biogeochemical configurations, management activities are experiments, blurring the line between basic and applied research. Responses to specific management manipulations are context specific, influenced by the current status or structure of the system, and this necessitates reference areas for management or restoration activities. Attempts to return systems to within their historical range of biotic and abiotic characteristics and processes may not be possible, and management activities directed at removing undesirable features of novel ecosystems may perpetuate or create such ecosystems. Management actions should attempt to maintain genetic and species diversity and encourage the biogeochemical characteristics that favor desirable species. Few resources currently exist to support the addition of proactive measures and rigorous experimental designs to current management activities. The necessary changes will not occur without strong input from stakeholders and policy makers, so rapid information transfer and proactive research-management activities by the scientific community are needed.
Pollen analytical, plant macrofossil and dendrochronological evidence together are used to reconstruct the late-glacial and Holocene vegetation history of the Highlands of Scotland. During the late-glacial period trees were almost, if not entirely, absent from the Highlands; vegetation analogous to that of Arctic regions of Europe today was present throughout the region. During the Holocene, in contrast, forest cover was extensive, with tree lines higher up the mountains and pine forests present even in the far northern Highlands during one millennium or so of especially favourable conditions with warmer, and sometimes drier, summers than today. During recent millennia the climate has been more similar to that of the present and the Highland vegetation was a mosaic of communities similar to that which we can find today in parts of western Scandinavia. During recent centuries extensive logging and deforestation, along with intensified grazing and management, have resulted in the present predominantly treeless landscapes. Appropriate conservation management, informed by palaeoecological record, may enable some areas to once again achieve their ecological potential, but only if allowed by other external human pressures.
The literature on common property-based resource management comprises many important studies that seek to specify the conditions under which groups of users will self-organize and sustainably govern resources upon which they depend. Using three of the more comprehensive such studies, and with an extensive review of writings on the commons, this paper demonstrates that the enterprise of generating lists of conditions under which commons are governed sustainably is a flawed and impossibly costly research task. For a way out, the paper examines the relative merits of statistical, comparative, and case study approaches to studying the commons. It ends with a plea for careful research design and sample selection, construction of causal mechanisms, and a shift toward comparative and statistical rather than single-case analyses. Such steps are necessary for a coherent, empirically-relevant theory of the commons.
Right relationship: building a whole earth economy
- P G Brown
- G Garver
- PG Brown
Asteroid mining? It’s not as crazy as it sounds
- A Hamer
Agenda for a new economy
- D C Korten
- DC Korten
Supreme Court of Canada
- Tsilhqot
The Code of Hammurabi
- J D Prince
- JD Prince
The land grabbers: the new fight over who owns the earth
- F Pearce
El Salvador’s mining ban and mining in Ontario’s ring of fire from the lens of ecological law
- C Sbert