Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries
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Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries Kathleen Birrell1 · Daniel Matthews2 Accepted: 17 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This special issue is animated by questions arising from the ecological conundrums and challenges of our contemporary moment. While these questions have been peripherally engaged in critiques of political economy, with particular reference to intersections between ecology and empire, and more pointedly in ecofeminism and emergent and innovative scholarship in ‘critical environmental law’, the complex jurisprudential and political challenges posed by the climate crisis and ecological degradation have not been central to critical legal thought. This collection draws together a range of new critical perspectives on intersections between law and ecology. The organising provocation for the special issue is the controversial Anthropocene thesis, which proposes the naming of a new geological epoch brought about by the practices and excesses of consumption, production and habitation. This thesis contends that the Holocene epoch, a period of recent climatic stability beginning at the close of the last ice age, has ended and we now find ourselves in a time of profound flux within the planetary climate system. The definitional and temporal boundaries of this new epoch remain contested, with the Anthropocene’s proposed date of origin ranging from the early seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth century (Lewis and Maslin 2018; Hamilton 2015; Davis and Todd 2017; Yusoff 2018). Many have critiqued or rejected the Anthropocene and the hierarchies implicit within its nomenclature, arguing that the concept posits a prematurely unified agent of change: a universalised and homogenised anthropos that must assume responsibility for climatic change, irrespective of the exclusionary demarcations and ecological harms perpetuated by capitalist and colonial social relations (Malm 2016; Malm and Hornborg 2014; Haraway 2016). As yet, the Anthropocene does not form part of the official Geologic Time Scale, as the details of this designation continue to * Kathleen Birrell [email protected] Daniel Matthews [email protected] 1
Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia
2
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
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K. Birrell, D. Matthews
be debated within the fields of stratigraphy and Earth Systems Science. Nonetheless, the Anthropocene thesis offers a useful shorthand for the radicality of the current disruptions taking place within the planet’s climate and ecology, and the term has enlivened a range of important interventions in the natural and social sciences, the arts and humanities (Crutzen 2002; Chakrabarty 2009; Turpin 2013; Latour 2017; Menley and Taylor 2017; DeLoughrey 2019). The material and discursive implications of the Anthropocene are manifold, but our particular intervention is concerned with the articulation of laws for, rather than of, the Anthropocene. This distinction follow
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