Our legal system needs a radical overhaul that asserts the rights of the whole ecosystem. A forthcoming conference will discuss the set out the vision for a Wild Law.
This article by Shehana Gomez appeared in The Ecologist, August 27th, 2018.
Re-wilding the Law might sound like an odd proposition, even a contradiction. Law is not meant to be wild.
It’s supposed to bring in a civilised, organised, orderly way of doing things. It sets out clear rules which govern our relationships with each other and the world around us.
So how can the law be wild?
Earth jurisprudence
The problem is that the laws we have created often do not reflect the ecological reality we live in. They do not reflect the laws of the earth.
The wild law view is that this is a fundamental problem underlying not just individual laws, but our whole system of law and governance. It has led to the severe environmental crisis we now find ourselves in.
The term wild law was coined by the South African environmental lawyer and author Cormac Cullinan. He argues that we live in a human-centred, or anthropocentric, civilisation, a “homosphere” which is cut off from the natural world around us. We see ourselves as separate from, and superior to, the rest of nature, when in reality we are not.
Cullinan draws on principles of earth jurisprudence, a philosophy articulated by the late Catholic priest and eco-philosopher Thomas Berry.
Earth jurisprudence asks us to re-examine the assumptions underlying our systems of law and governance, and shift them from being human-centered to being earth-centred or ecocentric. MORE…