The campaign for legal personhood for the Great Barrier Reef: Finding political and pedagogical value in a spectacular failure of care

Abstract

This paper examines the campaign for legal personhood for the Great Barrier Reef launched by the Environmental Defenders Office of North Queensland in 2014. Although this campaign has been unofficially shelved, the paper argues that it still provides a useful chance to think through the practicality and politics of some of the current experiments in environmental law, especially contemporary attempts to expand legal definitions of personhood. The EDO campaign is held up to critical scrutiny by considering its practical efficacy, environmental merits, conceptual foundations and ethico-political import, especially in relation to Indigenous justice. It argues that such experiments are to be welcomed, whether as immediate opportunities, thought experiments or pressure points, and that public and scholarly discussion of the legal personhood mechanism needs to be alert to the dangers of unknowingly and ironically replicating dominant power relations while seeking to overthrow them, but also of shutting down alternatives at precisely the moment we need them most.

A diffractive and decolonising reading methodology for education research

“…The reading I undertook included Reef texts from traditional Indigenous knowledge (Nunn & Reid, 2016;Pannell, 2006;Yunkaporta, 2019), Darwin's documentations of the Great Barrier Reef and reef formation (Darwin, 1842), Imperial Era British novels set on coral islands (Ballantyne, 1857(Ballantyne, /1986Golding, 1958), environmental science (for example, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, 2014Authority, , 2019Harrison, 2011), alternative perspectives of science enactments (Wertheim & Wertheim, n.d), socio-cultural environmental history (McCalman, 2013), and Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives on the contemporary status and future of the Reef (Barcan, 2020;Farrier, 2020;Whyte, 2020) and my own embodied experience of being on the Great Barrier Reef and in its waters. The methodology drew on Haraway's (2016) notion of thinking with companion species, and on the agency of relations with Country that is integral to Australian Indigenous knowledge systems.…”

Rights of Nature as a potential framework for the transformation of modern political communities

“…The RoN movement was born from a common perception that existing governance systems are by themselves incapable of responding to the current trends of ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss and climate change, given competing interests from different actors (e.g., industries; corporations; states) and the fundamental rules of the contemporary economic and political system (Barcan, 2019). As such, "environmental law has become a fertile site for creative experiments", one of which includes the recognition of non-human nature's subjecthood, agency and voice, and fundamental rights (Barcan, 2019: 5).…”

Introduction to the special issue “Climate and marine justice – debates and critical perspectives”

“…They mainly suggest technological solutions and technological visions to solve the climate crisis. There is a lack of transparency and discussion about the political implications, for example, of the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of the IPCC or of the way in which thinking up more radical solutions, such as degrowth, is prevented by the frameworks of these models (Beck and Mahony, 2017). In the sense of justice as recognition, ontological politics, conflicts, and pluralism are probably the latest frontier of environmental justice scholarship.…”

“…Recent studies on Latin America (e.g. Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020;Weißermel and Chaves, 2020), Turkey (Yaka, 2020), Australia (Barcan, 2020), and New Zealand (Winter, 2020) show the importance of recognizing the "ontological nature" (Blaser, 2009; Ruiz-de-Oña Plaza, 2020) of environmental injustices. Some environmental injustices cannot be explained by unravelling dissents on knowledge production, the power asymmetries, and the political economy at play as they are ultimately rooted in "multiple realities" or, in Blaser's (2013:547) Drawing inspiration from a "scholarship of presence" (Kaika, 2018(Kaika, :1714, an active presence or involvement in local and global socio-ecological struggles helps to understand multiple ontologies and to achieve epistemic justice.…”