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Environmental law has aesthetic dimensions. Aesthetic values have shaped the making of environmental law, and in turn such law governs many of our nature-based sensory experiences. Aesthetics is also integral to understanding the very fabric of environmental law, in its institutions, procedures and discourses. The Art of Environmental Law, the first book of its kind, brings new insights into the importance of aesthetic issues in a variety of domains of environmental governance around the world, from climate change to biodiversity conservation. It also argues for aesthetics, and relatedly the arts, to be taken more seriously in the practice of environmental law so as to improve our emotional and ethical capacities to address the upheavals of the Anthropocene.
Disciplined by industrial clock time, modern life distances people from nature's biorhythms such as its ecological, evolutionary, and climatic processes. The law is complicit in numerous ways. It compresses time through 'fast-track' legislation and accelerated resource exploitation. It suffers from temporal inertia, such as 'grandfathering' existing activities that limits the law's responsiveness to changing circumstances. Insouciance about past ecological damage, and neglect of its restoration, are equally serious temporal flaws: we cannot live sustainably while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired. Applying international and interdisciplinary perspectives on these issues, Time and Environmental Law explores how to align law with the ecological 'timescape' and enable humankind to 'tell nature's time'. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.
This landmark book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s. Across nature conservation, pollution control, natural resources governance and other domains, this book reveals how many of today's environmental laws emerged from precedents or events much earlier in the 20th century.The history is told through analysis of the discrepancy between the far greater efficacy of lawmakers to exploit rather than protect the environment, a discrepancy that grew as nature's backlash intensified in a rapidly de...
Through the lens of time, the book critiques environmental law and recommends ways to enable it to respond to nature's time scales.
Ecological restoration is as essential as sustainable development for the health of the biosphere. Restoration, however, has been a low priority of most countries' environmental laws, which tend to focus narrowly on rehabilitation of small, discrete sites rather than the more ambitious recovery of entire ecosystems and landscapes. Through critical theoretical perspectives and topical case studies, this book's diverse contributors explore a more ambitious agenda for ecological restoration law. Not only do they investigate current laws and other governance mechanisms; they also consider the philosophical and methodological bases for the law to take ecological restoration more seriously. Through exploration of themes relating to time, space, geography, semiotics, social justice, and scientific knowledge, this book offers innovative and critical insights into ecological restoration law.
'The phenomenon of anthropogenic climate change has become of critical importance to all countries. However, while the majority of developing countries contribute the least to global greenhouse gas emissions, they will generally bear the major burden of the social, environmental and economic impacts of climate change imposed upon them by developed countries. This cutting-edge book contains outstanding contributions by scholars from around the world on the need to expand the range of legal and policy mechanisms and strategies required to bridge the gaps between the north and the south to achieve global climate justice.' - Ben Boer, University of Sydney and former Co-director of the IUCN Acade...
Environmental harm is commonly associated with companies that extract, consume, and pollute our shared natural resources. Rarely are the 'unseen polluters,' the financiers that sponsor and profit from eco-damaging corporations, placed at the forefront of the environmental debate. By focusing on these unseen polluters, Benjamin Richardson provides a comprehensive examination of socially responsible investment (SRI), and offers a guide to possible reform. Richardson proposes that greater regulatory supervision of SRI will help ensure that the financial sector prioritizes ethically-based investments. In Socially Responsible Investment Law, he suggests that new governmental reforms should encourage companies to participate in socially responsible investments by providing a better mix of standards and incentives for SRI through measures that include redefining the fiduciary responsibilities of institutional investors to incorporate environmental concerns. By doing so, Richardson posits that corporate financiers, including banks, hedge funds, and pension plans, will become more accountable to the goals of ensuring sustainable development.
This book presents critical new scholarship on the state of law for sustainable development from an international and comparative perspective.
This book is about fiduciary law’s influence on the financial economy’s environmental performance, focusing on how the law affects responsible investing and considering possible legal reforms to shift financial markets closer towards sustainability. Fiduciary law governs how trustees, fund managers or other custodians administer the investment portfolios owned by beneficiaries. Written for a diverse audience, not just legal scholars, the book examines in a multi-jurisdictional context an array of philosophical, institutional and economic issues that have shaped the movement for responsible investing and its legal framework. Fiduciary law has acquired greater influence in the financial ec...
Indigenous Peoples and the Law provides an historical, comparative and contextual analysis of various legal and policy issues affecting Indigenous peoples. It focuses on the common law jurisdictions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, as well as relevant international law developments. Edited by Benjamin J Richardson, Shin Imai, and Kent McNeil, this collection of new essays features 13 contributors including many Indigenous scholars, drawn from around the world. The book provides a pithy overview of the subject-matter, enabling readers to appreciate the seminal issues, precedents and international legal trends of most concern to Indigenous peoples. The first half of Ind...