Response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds

Abstract

This article rethinks the doctrines of responsibility and protection in international environmental law in light of notions of response-abilities and care in more-than-human worlds. Inspired by the intersecting strands of new materialist, relational and posthuman literatures, and informed by critiques of them by decolonial, indigenous and black scholars, the analysis works with onto-epistemologies of becoming that posit an inseparability of being, knowing and acting with(in) the Anthropocene/s. Through the notion of response-abilities of care, the article reconfigures how the destructive and the restorative relations between humans and nonhumans could be construed beyond a narrow understanding of state sovereignty, territorial jurisdiction, liberal human-centred notions of individuated agency and the strict causal nexus between victim and perpetrator. The analysis concludes by reflecting on how law could remain open to emergent, unfolding and contingent potentialities of entangled human-nonhuman relations, and questions law’s capacity to recognize and respond to the agency and alterity of nonhumans. These configurations exceed the schema of responsibility and protection that organizes even international environmental law’s most progressive theories and practices, such as granting ‘rights to nature’.

Creating Synergies between International Law and Rights of Nature

“…125 In the context of rapidly evolving interpretations and understandings of intergenerational justice, the inclusion of RoN would support a less anthropocentric understanding of what the rights of future generations might mean by including nature in the frame. 126 It would support an approach to nature's right to a future that is outside the purely protective approach of international law (seen mainly through the lens of a human future and our capacity to have a sustainable future), therefore challenging the meaning of what is 'sustainable' not only from a human perspective, but from the perspective of nature.…”

The ‘question of possibilities’ as a leitmotif for re‐imagining law for the ‘Anthropocene’

“…Although debates on law and globalisation are ongoing (see generally e.g., Husa, 2018), the Anthropocene thesis presents rather different challenges to law. These include the need to reconfigure the ways in which law accounts for more‐than‐human worlds (see e.g., Boulot & Sterlin, 2021; Grear et al, 2021), the temporality of planetary processes (see Chakrabarty, 2021), and questions regarding inter‐ and intraspecies relations (see e.g., Petersmann, 2021; Rogers, 2020). To be clear, I do not want to suggest that law for the Anthropocene should necessarily build on, or that it could simply extend, transnational or global law perspectives.…”

“…1 See e.g., Kim & Bosselmann, 2013;Vidas et al, 2015;Kotzé, 2017;Hey, 2018;Kotzé, 2018;Stephens, 2018;Viñuales, 2018;Webster & Mai, 2021. 2 See e.g., Grear, 2015;Matthews, 2019 andPetersmann, 2021. See also contributions to the 2020 Special Issue of Law and Critique 'Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries' , and the 2022 Special Issue of the Journal of Human Rights in the Environment 'Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene' (forthcoming). 3 My thinking on this point has been inspired by the argument that climate change is 'legally disruptive' , in the sense that it 'cannot be addressed through the conventional application of legal doctrine' (Fisher et al, 2017, p. 177).…”

“… 2 2 See e.g., Grear, 2015; Matthews, 2019 and Petersmann, 2021. See also contributions to the 2020 Special Issue of Law and Critique ‘Laws for the Anthropocene: Orientations, Encounters, Imaginaries’, and the 2022 Special Issue of the Journal of Human Rights in the Environment ‘Constitutionalizing in the Anthropocene’ (forthcoming). …”

Sustainability and Interdisciplinarity as an Existential Necessity within a Planetary Perspective

“…Accordingly, a map does not portray the fact that a territory also includes the voluminous space from the (under-)ground until the boundaries of space and contains myriads of living and non-living entities, from liquids, gases, dust particles, rays, insects, bacteria, microbia, viruses, birds, hedgehogs, cats, humans etc.and thus makes us forget about them. (Petersmann 2021) Modernist humans might follow this fiction of nature as an empty stage for human acting, but only up to a point, where this stage becomes instable and threatens to bury humanity underneath it once and for all. Already by now, earth cataclysmically denies that it is a mere stage for humans to act upon but a powerful and eventually death-bringing actor.…”