Global Environmental Constitutionalism in the Anthropocene by Louis J. Kotzé
Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Forthcoming
8 Pages Posted: 4 May 2018
Date Written: April 18, 2018
Abstract
The evolution of the human species has made a mess of things. We hunt, burn, eat, kill, cut, capture, fight, control, and reproduce as if there were no tomorrow, an idiom now laced with irony. To make an extremely complex scientific debate simple and sobering, there is evidence that modern human activity is currently causing a geologically great mass extinction, known as the “Anthropocene.” And then within roughly the same period of time of profound environmental carelessness, humans have achieved the astonishing invention specifying which laws matter most, known as “constitutionalism.”
Louis Kotzé’s searching and important Global Environmental Constitutionalism In The Anthropocene fits these disparate dimensions together. It offers a glimmer of global hope for a multi-faceted legal response to the Anthropocene based in the notion that collective concepts in national, regional and global environmental constitutionalism can help achieve better environmental outcomes.
Keywords: environmental constitutionalism, environmental law, constitutional law, book review, Anthropocene
JEL Classification: K32, Q50
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation