Overview

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.

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9780367439781

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Reviews

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

Author Information

Peter D. Burdon is Associate Professor at Adelaide Law School, University of Adelaide, Australia. James Martel is Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University, USA.

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