Responsibility in End Time: Environmental Harm and the Role of Law in the Anthropocene

2022 ◽  
pp. 235-266
Author(s):  
Pierre Cloutier de Repentigny
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Harm

scholarly journals The Role of Literary Artists in Environmental Movements: Minamata Disease and Michiko Ishimure

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Orika Komatsubara
Keyword(s):  
Social Issues ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Case Study Methodology ◽  
Minamata Disease ◽  
Environmental Resistance ◽  
The People ◽  
Poetic Expression ◽  
Study Methodology

By offering new fantasies, perspectives and representations, artists have the power to make people aware of social issues and inspire them to action. This paper describes how artists can offer a vision of environmental resistance by employing fantasy and using tools of poetic expression for communities affected by environmental destruction. This paper employs a case study methodology to examine the Minamata disease victims’ movement in Japan through the lens of environmental justice. As part of this movement, writer Michiko Ishimure created a fantasy called Mouhitotsu-no-konoyo, based in a mythical world and featuring the moral relationships that the people of Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, had embraced before modernisation. I will show the importance of this fantasy for the movement, analysing it from two perspectives: those of ningenteki-dori (the human principle) and the invisible fantasy about the mythical world. Ishimure’s fantasy offers a moral message to prevent further environmental harm.  

Part III Conceptual Pillars, Ch.16 Harm Prevention

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brunnée Jutta
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Significant Harm ◽  
Actual Harm ◽  
The Face ◽  
Harm Prevention ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses how international environmental law originates from and revolves around the harm prevention rule. It focuses on three points of contention, each related to the role of due diligence in harm prevention, and each highlighted by recent judicial engagements with the harm prevention rule. First, it is generally accepted that a state's obligation to prevent environmental harm is not absolute, but requires due diligence in the face of risk of significant harm. However, it is unclear whether a failure to act diligently to avert harm on its own—absent actual harm—can amount to a breach of the harm prevention rule. Second, the relationship between the procedural and substantive dimensions of the harm prevention rule remains ambiguous. Third, there is some uncertainty as to where the line runs between the harm prevention obligation and the precautionary principle, given the focus of both notions on risk. These inter-related conceptual questions affect the harm prevention rule's function as a reference point for international environmental law.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 261-270
Author(s):  
Arden Rowell ◽  
Kenworthey Bilz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Law ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Environmental Laws ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
Law And Psychology ◽  
The Relationship

Throughout this book, we have sought to identify what we see as the basic building blocks for environmental law and psychology, and for applying a psychological analysis to specific environmental laws. To that end, we have identified key ways we believe that psychological research can help in understanding and predicting why, when, and how people think about and respond to environmental harm. We have also argued that a psychological approach to environmental law and policy, which takes account of this research, can help the law more effectively shape human behavior to desired ends—whatever those ends might be. This conclusion flags a set of questions, projects, and data needs that could help policy makers and attorneys to even better understand and predict the impacts of environmental law as well as develop more effective (and in some cases cheaper) environmental laws and regulations. This includes the possibility of using law to debias; the relationship between politics and the psychology of environmental law; how environmental law might be updated in light of psychological analysis; and the role of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic within environmental law and psychology.

Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law: Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
KISHAN KHODAY ◽  
VANESSA LAMB ◽  
TYLER MCCREARY ◽  
KARIN MICKELSON ◽  
USHA NATARAJAN ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Sustainable Livelihoods ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
The World

Environmental harm is of increasing concern to peoples and states all over the world, whether in relation to ensuring access to healthy air, water, food, and sustainable livelihoods, or coping with the diversity of challenges posed by changing climates and ecologies. While international lawyers have focused on crafting solutions to environmental problems, less attention is paid to the disciplinary role in fostering harmful and unsustainable behavioural patterns. Environmental issues are usually relegated to the specialized field of international environmental law. This project explores instead the role of nature in the general discipline, arguing that the natural environment is a determinative factor in shaping international law, and that assumptions about nature lie at the heart of disciplinary concepts such as sovereignty, development, economy, property, and human rights.

Dirty hands: The toxic politics of denunciation

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amelia Fiske
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Corporate Accountability ◽  
Dirty Hands ◽  
Bare Hand ◽  
Region I ◽  
History Of ◽  
Bodily Knowledge ◽  
Asymmetric Relationships

In September 2013, President Correa balanced himself on a felled log over an oil waste pit in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Extending a bare hand dripping with crude, he launched La Mano Sucia de Chevron campaign, demanding accountability for decades of contamination. This article explores the role of bodily knowledge in witnessing industrial contamination and struggles for environmental justice. Situating the mano sucia in the history of activism in the region, I show how the juxtaposition of different hands within the same motif reveals profoundly asymmetric relationships to the toxic entanglements that oil produces. Dirtied hands reveal the co-production of toxicity and power in extractive landscapes: At times throughout this article, the gesture calls for corporate accountability and distributive environmental justice, at other times, it reveals the systemic production of material, social and political distance between the accrual of benefit and the production of harm in an industrial-capitalist order. While drawing on the central role of bodily knowledges in apprehending environmental harm, I argue that bodily knowledges must also be examined for their specific relationships to forms of power and exploitation, and for their potential for appropriation by other parties – even when dedicated to condemning environmental injustice.

Globalisation, environmental harm, and progress:the role of consensus and liability

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 43-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Zandvoort
Keyword(s):  
Genetically Modified Organisms ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Free Markets ◽  
Transportation Energy ◽  
Beneficial Effects ◽  
Oil Transportation ◽  
Global Spread ◽  
The Relationship

Two conditions are stated that must be fulfilled to make sure that the negative effects of environmental pollution and risks stemming from the spread of free markets and technology do not outweigh the beneficial effects of this development. (1) For all activities, all those who may experience the negative effects of the activities must have given their consent to the activities and the conditions under which they are performed. (2) Those who engage in activities without this consent must be held to unlimited and unconditional liability for the negative effects that the activities may cause for those who did not give their consent. These conditions are necessary principles for the responsible management of environmental harm and risks. If the conditions are not satisfied, then the belief that the global spread of free markets and technology is beneficial for all, or does not harm anyone, cannot be justified. Neither of the conditions is fulfilled at present. This is illustrated using examples drawn from international legislation regarding liability for oil transportation, energy production, genetically modified organisms and chemicals in the environment. Directions for improving existing liability legislation are identified. The relationship between the conditions and the precautionary principle is explained.

scholarly journals The early detection of and rapid response (EDRR) to invasive species: a conceptual framework and federal capacities assessment

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie K. Reaser ◽  
Stanley W. Burgiel ◽  
Jason Kirkey ◽  
Kelsey A. Brantley ◽  
Sarah D. Veatch ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Invasive Species ◽  
Early Detection ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Rapid Response ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government ◽  
Policy And Planning ◽  
The Impact

AbstractGlobalization necessitates that we address the negative externalities of international trade and transport, including biological invasion. The US government defines invasive species to mean, “with regard to a particular ecosystem, a non-native organism whose introduction causes, or is likely to cause, economic or environmental harm, or harm to human, animal, or plant health.” Here we address the role of early detection of and rapid response to invasive species (EDRR) in minimizing the impact of invasive species on US interests. We provide a review of EDRR’s usage as a federal policy and planning term, introduce a new conceptual framework for EDRR, and assess US federal capacities for enacting well-coordinated EDRR. Developing a national EDRR program is a worthwhile goal; our assessment nonetheless indicates that the federal government and its partners need to overcome substantial conceptual, institutional, and operational challenges that include establishing clear and consistent terminology use, strategically identifying and communicating agency functions, improving interagency budgeting, facilitating the application of emerging technologies and other resources to support EDRR, and making information relevant to EDRR preparedness and implementation more readily accessible. This paper is the first in a special issue of Biological Invasions that includes 12 complementary papers intended to inform the development and implementation of a national EDRR program.

Human Rights and the Environment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Vanderheiden
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Development Objectives ◽  
Social Empowerment

This chapter assesses the prospects and limits of human rights as ethical constructs and political mechanisms for protecting against forms of environmental harm that threaten human well-being. Advantages of a rights-based ethical framework include the linking of ethical norms of environmental protection or stewardship with international law and commitments to promoting humanitarian objectives, which provide those norms with an institutional foundation and help narrow the gap between environmental imperatives and those with global justice imperatives and development objectives. It considers the role of recognized human rights in efforts to better guard against anthropogenic environmental harm as well as specifically environmental rights that have been proposed for inclusion alongside them, and it finds rights to confer more political advantages through the social empowerment of right holders and linkage with rights-protecting institutions than philosophical ones in clarifying or motivating the obligations of individual or collective agents.

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