Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the biopolitics of environmental personhood

Jade-Ann Reeves; Timothy D Peters

doi:10.1080/10383441.2022.2037882

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Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the biopolitics of environmental personhood

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the biopolitics of environmental personhood

Jade-Ann Reeves and Timothy D Peters

Griffith Law Review, Vol.30(3), pp.474-504

2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2022.2037882

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Abstract

This article critically analyses the novelty of the legal personhood of nature and, in particular, whether it signals cracks in the anthropocentrism of Western law. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, it contributes to the theorisation of environmental personhood by focusing on the biopolitical nature of personhood itself. It does so by engaging in a critical examination of the attribution of legal personality to the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as the most detailed and sophisticated legislative example to date of legally personifying a natural thing. Working through three key conceptual terms in Foucault's and Esposito's work (population, personhood and immunisation), we demonstrate the way in which a biopolitical analysis raises questions about whether ascribing legal personhood to nature addresses anthropocentrism and its effects. We draw attention to the risk of ascribing legal personhood to nature, which is that, instead of signalling an ontological shift in the Western anthropocentric understandings of environment, it operates within and reinforces the dominant legal worldview - unless, that is, the granting of personhood to nature calls into question the dominant paradigm of personhood itself. The article concludes by suggesting alternative ways of developing human understandings of, and relationship with, nature.

Details

Title: Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the biopolitics of environmental personhood
Authors: Jade-Ann Reeves (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
Timothy D Peters (Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Law and Society
Publication details: Griffith Law Review, Vol.30(3), pp.474-504
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Australasia
Date published: 2022
DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2022.2037882
ISSN: 1839-4205; 1038-3441
Copyright note: © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Grants: New Approaches to Corporate Legality: Beyond Neoliberal Governance., DE200100881, Australian Research Council (Australia, Canberra) - ARC
Organisation Unit: University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland; School of Law and Society
Language: English
Record Identifier: 99615408902621
Output Type: Journal article