Place‐speaking: Attending to the relational, material and governance messages of Silent Spring

Abstract

The growing recognition of place agency, particularly in relational-material conceptualisations, presents a challenge and an opportunity for legal geographic scholarship. Place is often invisibilised and abstracted by formal rules and institutions, but place shapes (and is shaped by) the law, and coproduces informal lore, norms and cultural practices that interact with formal law and influence governance. Such place-work is particularly important for environmental law, for which place is or should be central, and is well overdue for scholarly interrogation. The focus of this paper is Silent Spring, often credited as having launched the modern environmental movement. The lens of legal geography is deployed to illustrate the significance of Rachel Carson's foregrounding of place and non-human agency, validation of lay knowledges and alternative approaches in both science and policy. Carson's work demonstrates remarkable prescience in heralding relational ontologies, the relevance of materiality, and the value of collaborative governance. There is a challenge here for environmental law to recognise and embrace the many voices of place at multiple scales, and the role of place in generating its own legal ordera legal pluralism hitherto largely ignored. An opportunity exists to appreciate place law more fully, and deploy this recognition to address the environmental, regulatory and institutional problems of our time, including those that define the Anthropocene. K E Y W O R D Sgovernance, legal geography, legal pluralism, materiality, place agency, relationality

Introduction to the Handbook on Space, Place and Law

“…Nicole Latulippe describes the cosmology of Indigenous thought, in which 'the earth is a living source of law' and rules derive from 'Place-Thought'. Robinson et al draw on Bartel's (2018) concept of 'place laws', which are laws that are generated by place itself, via its own agency, and in concert and collaboration with both human and nonhuman co-creators.…”

“…Deleterious environmental impacts constitute evidence both for place agency and the existence of, and noncompliance with, place laws (Bartel 2018). As Nicole Graham observes, colonialism, property and capitalism are perverse in their denial of both nature and human: 'Without the place-based knowledge manifest in the laws of local communities, and without the observance of local laws by those communities, entire landscapes were misread, neglected and damaged.'…”

Islam, legal geography and methodological challenges in Indonesia

“…The importance of place-based forms of regulation has been discussed in recent publications. For example, Bartel (2018) analyses the political case of Silent Spring (drawing on Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring), highlighting the importance of place-based knowledge to develop legislation on pest control. In Cambodia, law-making for the protection of wetlands lacks not only placebased knowledge, but often excludes female perspectives, because law-making is inherently male-driven (Gillespie 2018).…”

What’s missing from legal geography and materialist studies of law? Absence and the assembling of asylum appeal hearings in Europe

“…There is nevertheless awareness of materiality’s limitations for studying law. Some feel it has not gone far enough, remaining confined to human materialities and insufficiently attending to ecosystems, non‐human life, place‐agency, and environments (Bartel, 2018; Graham et al, 2017). Others assert that the law should not be completely reduced to materials (Bennett & Layard, 2015; also Pottage, 2012).…”