Book chapter
Environmental Personhood: A Novel Principle of Law for Climate Justice?
The Routledge Handbook of Applied Climate Change Ethics, pp.442-456
Routledge Handbooks in Applied Ethics, Routledge
2024
Abstract
In 2008, the new Ecuadorian Constitution became the first legal document to recognize Nature as having rights, legally concretizing Christopher’s Stone momentous 1972 invitation and Thomas Berry and Cormac Cullinan’s call to an Earth Jurisprudence. Over the ensuing decade, rights of Nature Constitutional, legislative and judicial initiatives arose in a growing number of jurisdictions, from Bolivia to India, from New Zealand to Colombia, marking the practical articulation of this novel legal theory as one of the fastest growing legal movements of the 21st century. Over such a relatively brief period of time, three phases can already be identified within the movement: after an initial focus on the acceptance of Nature as a right-holder, a shift occurred toward the identification of said right-holder as a legal person. Since such an identification was far from uncontroversial, and in response to numerous critiques advanced toward the use of categories of personhood inherited from the Roman legal tradition, the movement now inhabits a third phase, in which the focus becomes the creation of a novel category of personhood, tentatively called ‘environmental personhood’. Albeit still protean, the emergence of such a novel category nonetheless represents a fertile terrain for inter-jurisdictional and inter-normative dialogue around climate justice and the ethical obligations of global governance institutions. In a time of global climate-induced social uncertainty, could ‘environmental personhood’ emerge as a novel principle of international law?
Details
- Title
- Environmental Personhood: A Novel Principle of Law for Climate Justice?
- Authors
- Alessandro Pelizzon (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
- Contributors
- Donald A. Brown (Editor) - Widener UniversityKathryn Gwiazdon (Editor) - Northern Illinois UniversityLaura Westra (Editor) - University of Windsor
- Publication details
- The Routledge Handbook of Applied Climate Change Ethics, pp.442-456
- Series
- Routledge Handbooks in Applied Ethics
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.4324/9781003039860-45; 10.4324/9781003039860
- ISBN
- 9781003039860
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99746898302621
- Output Type
- Book chapter
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