Looking for the Space between Law and Ecology

Abstract

This is the Introduction to the edited volume 'Law and Ecology'. The book constitutes an ambitious critique which at the same time encourages the law to look outside itself, over at new theoretical areas of influence; and look deeper into its own limited ecological position as simply another form of social expression alongside politics, economics, technology, science, and so on, which, however, is expected to make use of given legal notions and mechanisms. To this effect, ecology in this volume is understood in its broadest possible meaning as the disciplinary and ontological plane on which law finds itself. For the purposes of this anthology, we understand the law to be situated in this wider ecology that combines the natural, the human, the artificial, the legal, the scientific, the political, the economic and so on, all of which coexisting on a plane of contingency and fluid boundaries.4 In some respects, this is the real meaning of Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology, namely that ‘everything is connected to everything else’.5 We put forth a processual rather than value-based ecology and, to quote Deleuze and Guattari, ‘we make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production of industry’.6 This makes our understanding of ecology legal, just as it makes our law ecological. The ‘production of industry’, that is the various elements that repeat themselves in nature and humanity in the form of processes/products is the focus of the present connection between law and ecology. Values that have led nowhere successful so far, are now replaced by a study of the processes that transcend the usual dichotomy between human/natural. In this, we follow Guattari’s conception of three ecologies, namely a ‘mental, a natural and a cultural ecology’:7 nothing less then, than an ethicopolitical articulation of the connections between subjectivity, biosphere and society,8 in which the law finds itself floating about. This new, critical environmental law we attempt to sketch here can only situate itself along other disciplines in a wider eco-logy and, in the process, both construct a new oikos (a ‘home’, eco-, from Greek oikos) that will embrace continuous material and conceptual movement; and, at the same time, a new critical language and rationality (-logy, from Greek logos, meaning both language and reason) that will address the complexity of the interconnection between law and ecology.

Keywords: Critical Environmental Law, Environmental Law, Law and Ecology, Ecology, Deleuze, Luhmann, Autopoiesis, Biology

JEL Classification: I20, K10, K32, K19, K49, D63