Literature Review

In this interactive article, The Gaia Foundation explains Earth Jurisprudence, provides legal precedents, examples of earth jurisprudence in practice as well as its core principles : Wholeness, Lawfulness, Duty of Care, Rights of Eart, Mutual Enhancement and Resilience. The present international legal system is, in large part, based on a jurisprudence developed during the industrial era to serve colonists, industrialists and corporations. Thomas Berry was clear that Earth Jurisprudence, whilst a new term, is not a new philosophy or practice. He pointed towards two sources of inspiration - Mother Earth and Indigenous Peoples

Given that the International Tribunal has emerged from civil society rather than state- centered international law, and given that countries like Australia and the United States do not recognize, in State or Federal law, the intrinsic rights of plants, animals, or ecosystems to exist, what possible benefits do Rights of Nature Tribunals offer the natural world, and what impact can they have on the current legal system?In this paper, I the author outlines the creation and ongoing hearings of the International Tribunal and its Regional Chambers and provide an overview of Earth jurisprudence, the emerging theory of Earth-centered law and governance from which the Tribunals have emerged. The author then contextualizes the Rights of Nature Tribunals within the phenomenon of peoples’ tribunals during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She suggests that like many “peoples’ tribunals” before them, Rights of Nature Tribunals provide a powerful voice for civil society concerns and create an alternative narrative to that offered by western legal systems regarding environmental destruction. They also have the potential to play a role in transforming existing law and offer a welcome, cathartic contribution to the burgeoning field of Earth jurisprudence.

Most legal systems promote the interest of the human community while giving no real protection to other species, or to the planet itself. They reflect and perpetuate a view of the Earth as simply a collection of ‘resources' or objects which human beings are entitled to exploit for their exclusive benefit.So what if there were another jurisprudence based upon the concept that the planet and all species have rights? And they have those rights by virtue of their existence as members of a single Earth community?

This dialogue/interview outlines the benefits of an earth-centered law, the recommendations in the approaches for achieving its implementation and the obstacles that may impede it.

This article calls for a reassessment of our core beliefs on how we relate to the environment through a deep dive into the philosophical foundations of environmental protection. With this purpose, it shows how Earth-centered discourses have existed in human societies and civilizations for millennia. Different religious and philosophical underpinnings all share a view of humanity as an integral part of an organic whole, revering all living things. While recent developments in jurisprudence may appear novel, they are somewhat latent and emergent. Theories of land ethics, rights of nature, Earth-centered environmental ethics, wild law, and Earth jurisprudence all build on these philosophical crescendos and have proved influential at the international level. It is time to find new approaches to the law that rely on the value of nature. This article tells us the why and the how.

This article presents an interpretation of Earth Jurisprudence as a legal philosophy. It has sought to outline the legal categories proposed in Earth Jurisprudence and consider how they interact with each other. It began by describing Earth Jurisprudence as a theory of natural law. It posited the existence of two kinds of ‘law’, organised in a hierarchy. At the apex is Great Law, which represents the principle of Earth community. Below the Great Law is Human Law, which represents rules articulated by human authorities that are consistent with the Great Law and enacted for the common good of the comprehensive Earth community. Human Law was also described as purposive rather than neutral or value free. The stated purpose of human law is to secure conditions that favour the health and future flourishing of the Earth community. On this account, Human Law cannot truly be understood without reference to the ideal or common good toward which it is striving.

Climate change represents the most complex and important challenge to the international community today. Scholars and advocates from diverse disciplines have attempted to contribute to solutions to this problem with some success. International criminal law scholars have been, with a few exceptions, largely absent from these debates. I argue that attention to the purposes of international criminal law can help to address this deficit. In this Article, I argue that international criminal law can play a meaningful role in addressing climate-harming behavior if policymakers intentionally harness the expressive power of the criminal law to stigmatize the many small behaviors that, taken together, contribute to climate change. My argument is in contrast to previous attempts to articulate a role for international criminal law because it is intentionally modest and therefore more politically plausible. I do not attempt to hold every polluter criminal responsible or to create a grand new international institution. Instead, I draw on insights from behavioral psychology and economics to show that the criminal law can, under the appropriate conditions, affect the attitudes of ordinary citizens and thereby affect their behavior. By following this approach, international criminal law can finally begin to help address climate change. What is the purpose of creating and pursuing climate crimes? The answer to this question should inform both how climate crimes are formulated and prosecuted and how policymakers assess whether the prosecution of climate crimes is effective. Put slightly differently, before policymakers can know if prosecuting climate crimes is worth the effort, they must know why they are undertaking prosecutions in the first place. There are several purposes that might support the creation of climate crimes. These purposes would suggest different points of emphasis for prosecutors. And perhaps more importantly, they would suggest different metrics for assessing whether the use of the criminal law is an effective strategy.

Landscape architecture has two areas significant to focus on sustainability, and urbanization, and global cities: landscape planning, i.e., bioregional planning (bioregionalism) and urban design. Compared with urban planning and architecture, landscape architecture’s status regarding bioregionalism and urban design has diminished. Bioregionalism are and urban design are reconsidered vis-à-vis sustainable urban form, globalization, and landscape architecture’s potential role. andscape architecture’s contribution to bioregionalism was established in Olmsted’s Yosemite Valley plan and more recently the 1960s environmental movement exemplified by luminaries in the profession, e.g., McHarg, Lyle, Steinitz. Characterizing landscape architecture’s “generalist” underpinnings, embracing works of Powell, Marsh, Pinchot as well as those of Mumford, Lynch, Berry, Wilson, and Relph is also significant. Landscape architecture’s bona fides in urban design date to urban planning being largely conducted by landscape architects in the 19th century including Nolen, Peets, Manning, Kessler, the Olmsteds, and Wright. Landscape architecture’s practice of regional planning and urban design has diminished for two reasons. First, planning regionally is difficult to implement, although this is changing. Second, New Urbanism and Smart Growth have displaced landscape architecture. Nevertheless, landscape architecture is poised for leadership in a number of areas – to realize an “ecological tapestry of urban form” in a global era. Sustainable practices of the land-water nexus while addressing carbon emissions are essential. Ecology’s natural systems model within bioregions dictates broadly defining urban form. Interrelationships within watersheds are paramount, e.g., regarding carbon and hydrological cycles as complex bounded systems, conservation of areas of ecological value, multinuclear and multimodal settlement, and urban agriculture.

Urban residents in the developed world do not encounter and are not faced with decisions regarding the relationship between human action and human effect on the environment; they do not have to see the source of their comfort or the consequences of that comfort, downstream. This in turn has contributed to societal attitudes that have led to over consumption of natural resources and environmental degradation. This paper proposes an alternate path for sustainable urban development and retrofit, which takes into account human-environment connections. It is argued that utilizing bioregional ideals in urban areas can contribute to an epistemological shift in the human relationship to the environment and natural resources from the current condition. A synthesis of bioregional philosophy, ecological planning, and behavior change literatures is presented. These literatures, each within their own disciplinary boundaries, point toward similar conclusions regarding “sustainable” living. This synthesis of literature is presented as a model proposed to have potential to help move societal attitudes toward environmental understanding and environmentally responsible behaviors: urban bioregionalism. It is posited that retrofitting urban areas through the integration of nature and natural systems, while concurrently fostering active citizen participation through stewardship and community engagement, might deepen human-environment connections. This thereby might influence individual and society actions and consumption patterns. This paper provides an overview of the literatures reviewed, including early regional planning, bioregional philosophy, ecological planning, and behavior change literatures. A graphical representation and description of this synthesis of literature is then introduced: a model of urban bioregionalism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the model, and potentials for integrating bioregional ideals into cities. Simply adding nature to the city will not make all urban residents “environmentalists”. However, whether or not implementing urban bioregionalism influences a shift in society to a new epistemology and a new way of living and connecting with nature, utilizing this model could influence the livability of cities and their connectedness to the larger global ecosystem. In the face of crumbling infrastructure and regulatory obligations in cities in growth or decline, implementing bioregional ideals in urban areas has the potential to address human-environment connections in urban areas, that may ultimately lead to far more sustainable and resilient practices and patterns of urban living than the current condition.

Dynamic landscape change affects and is affected by human attitudes. The effect of pattern on process has been investigated mainly in landscape ecological sciences, focusing on whether and how the human influence on spatial organization of landscape creates stable, functioning ecosystems. In earlier ecological studies, despite embedding their values, perception and attitudes when delineating a place, humans have been treated as an independent, separate entity. Equally, the ecological imperative expressed through operational models of conservation planning changes the physical organization of landscape in such a way that it affects public connection to landscape and influences views and attitudes towards ecosystem governance. A more comprehensive understanding is needed of these two phenomena, addressing the linkages between ecosystem conservation and how people respond to dynamic change. Therefore we employ ‘sense of place’ as a broad concept to assess and evaluate the way in which people shape their responsiveness to place through a bioregional planning approach. . This paper focuses on the attitudinal dimension of sense of place in planning-based activities. The results suggest that although place connection strongly empowers protective and ethical-based actions, it remains unclear how planning renders the negotiation of the different actors’ values with respect to the concept of place. A conceptual framework is proposed, to assess the role of sense of place as an integrative concept in understanding the linkages of social-ecological systems and the need for future research to investigate how planning is receptive to the multitude of actor’s values and attitudes that shape social-ecological changes across the landscape.

This paper explores issues in the expansion of environmental justice rhetoric to the developing world, and propose insights from resilience theory, political ecology, and bioregionalism as supplements. I do this from the frame of the San DiegoTijuana region, where regional inequalities are stark and global processes have a heavy local footprint. Sharing a broadly-defined natural region, the growing evidence of ecological crisis increasingly calls for collaboration between two communities which often perceive themselves as relatively disconnected. Understanding challenges to social-ecological resilience and environmental justice in the San Diego-Tijuana region, however, also requires understanding it as an inflection point for global economic, military, and human migration flows occurring at many scales. It is in the context of building effective regional collaboration that environmental justice must engage the analyses of scale and political economy contained in political ecology as a challenge. I suggest, however, that any environmental justice discourse informed by political ecology cannot remain abstract from the local context. A “bioregional” community forged around shared ecological systems may serve as an impor

The adoption of bioregionalism by institutions that are instrumental in river basin management has significant potential to resolve complex water resource management problems. The Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) in England provides an example of how localized bioregional institutionalization of adaptive comanagement, consensus decision making, local participation, indigenous technical and social knowledge, and “win-win” outcomes can potentially lead to resilient partnership working. Our analysis of the WRT’s effectiveness in confronting nonpoint source water pollution, previously impervious to centralized agency responses, provides scope for lesson-drawing on institutional design, public engagement, and effective operation, although some evident issues remain