The Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law
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The final interview, with Franc¸oise Verge`s, concerns the relation between the social and the formation of empire. She argues that the constitution of the social in modernity was closely connected with colonial relations. The interview draws attention to the continuation of the model of colonization today in the new spaces created by globalization. In the grey zones of globalization are to be found ‘postcolonial colonies’. Her hypothesis is that processes of creolization exist alongside other processes produced by globalization, which entails not just networks and contacts, but also conflict. Indeed, the distinctive feature of creolization is violence and it signals an entirely different conception of the social than that in modern sociology. As interviews, we do not get fully worked out answers to complex and challenging questions. The volume does succeed in its aim in orienting critical thinking and promoting debate and further questions. The interviews are excellently edited and contain much that is new. The only criticism that can be made is that the problematic of globalization tends to overshadow other dimensions of the contemporary challenge to social theory. Gerard Delanty University of Liverpool, UK.
The Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law Sean Coyle and Karen Morrow Hart Publishing, Oxford and Portland, 2004, xv þ 228pp. ISBN: 1 84113 360 4. Contemporary Political Theory (2005) 4, 338–340. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300202
Most writings about environmental law read it narrowly, with an assumption that it is merely an instrumental response to the contemporary problems of environmental management. Rarely do writers investigate the deeper philosophical currents that shape environmental law and its applications. In a very compact discussion, the authors have gone far beyond this limited view and attempted to link the substance and structure of current environmental law with broader changes in the philosophical treatment of human–nature relationships. The writing is dense but not inaccessible, and the authors have made a conscious attempt to keep the reader oriented to their thesis. The difficulties primarily reside in the authors’ attempt to make a broad statement about environmental law which, in fact, is limited to common law and most particularly to the English experience. This criticism is offset by the care that Contemporary Political Theory 2005 4
Book Reviews
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the authors have used in constructing a legal and philosophical history, and in weaving together the broad historical development of ideas about property and rights with the more narrow legal treatment of these same subjects. At the beginning, the authors state that their primary purpose is to demonstrate that contemporary environmental law is the end result of longterm changes in political thinking about the environment that began with a moral rather than an instrumental view. However, there is also a subtext to the argument that links this philosophical shift to structural changes in political economy, such as the rise
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