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Published VersionCC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Book
The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene
Earth System Governance, The MIT Press
2025
Abstract
A compelling proposal for new international law and institutions to address the planetary crisis that improves biodiversity protection, supports Indigenous peoples, and prevents catastrophic climate change. In The Ecology Politic , Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel contend that the roots of our planetary crisis lie in the modern state: in its destructive entanglement with capitalism and its colonial legacies of extraction and oppression. This, in turn, has shaped global governance and international law, as they continue to fail to curb global heating, deforestation, and extinction. In a far-reaching critique of the foundational political theory of the modern state the Body-Politic the authors insist that nothing less than a radically different model of the polity an Ecology Politic is needed if we are to escape this impasse. Burke and Fishel argue that the international rule of law enacts a sovereign ban of nature that appropriates nonhuman lives for profit and use while denying them political and legal standing. We fail because we rely on the very institutions, worldviews, and systems that generated the crisis to solve it. The authors reconsider political power, agency, scale, and democracy in the Anthropocene and assert a biospheric ethic that values the entangled planetary structure of matter, energy, and life. Further, they argue for more-than-human beings to be represented in an ecological democracy that flows across borders. In short, they imagine a polity whose fundamental purpose is to protect planetary ecosystems and nurture interlocking systems of social and ecological justice
Details
- Title
- The Ecology Politic: Power, Law, and Earth in the Anthropocene
- Authors
- Anthony Burke - UNSW SydneyStefanie R Fishel - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Publication details
- 306 pages
- Series
- Earth System Governance
- Publisher
- The MIT Press
- Date published
- 2025
- DOI
- 10.7551/mitpress/15843.001.0001
- ISBN
- 9780262383400; 9780262552554; 9780262383417
- Copyright note
- © 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work is subject to a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 991107950402621
- Output Type
- Book
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