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Crisis, Resilience, and the Time of Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 August 2019

Jaye Ellis
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Abstract

The important and no longer novel insight from ecology that ecosystems are dynamic and ever-changing along immensely complex causal pathways prompts the further insight that environmental protection regimes should promote not a particular ecosystemic end state, but rather ecosystem resilience, or the capacity to absorb and adapt to stress without compromising essential function. For law to embrace resilience as an objective, it is argued, it must itself be dynamic and flexible, capable of learning and adaptation. This poses potentially serious challenges to law’s resilience: to what extent are flexibility and adaptability at odds with what Niklas Luhmann argues is an essential feature of normative systems, namely, resistance to learning in the face of disappointment? The potentially rapid rate of change expected of a law oriented to ecosystem resilience could overwhelm law’s capacity to provide the measure of order, stability, and predictability that are core to its contribution, or prestation, to society. This paper takes this challenge seriously, but also explores another possible implication of law in the pursuit of ecosystem resilience: if environmental law is no longer conceived of in primarily instrumental terms, as a means to bring about a specific set of ecosystem objectives, there may be some possibility for its own resilience to be enhanced.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , August 2019 , pp. 305 - 320
Copyright
© Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 2019 

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the International Environmental Law and International Legal Theory Interest Group Workshop, European Society of International Law Annual Meeting, Riga, Latvia, 2016. Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is gratefully acknowledged.

References

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3. Holling, Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management, supra note 1; Ruhl, “Environmental Law”, supra note 1.

4. J Klabbers, “Possible Islands of Predictability: The Legal Thought of Hannah Arendt” (2007) 20:1 Leiden J Int’l L 1.

5. Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, Pour un catastrophisme éclairé : Quand l’impossible est certain (Seuil, 2002) at 13Google Scholar. ‘Its possibility, which does not precede its reality, will have preceded it once the reality has appeared’ [translated by author].

6. Ibid at 13.

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8. Ibid at 131 ff.

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10. de Goede and Randalls point to a growing tendency to compare climate change to a looming military or terrorist threat: Marieke de Goede & Samuel Randalls, “Precaution, Preemption: Arts and Technologies of the Actionable Future” (2009) 27:5 Environment & Planning D, Society and Space 859. Certainly, if successful, such rhetorical strategies could lead, as Swyngedouw argues, to a depoliticisation of climate change: Erik Swyngedouw, “Apocalypse Forever? Post-Political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change” (2010) 27:2 Theory, Culture & Society 213. However, the comparison to military security appears to involve preaching to the choir. Environmental catastrophe does not appear to galvanize the public in the same manner as the threat of terrorism or other security threats. Action on climate change certainly has large numbers of fervent supporters, but the language of catastrophe has largely failed thus far to move environmental protection from progressive to mainstream.

11. Dupuy, supra note 5 at 142. ‘The problem is that we do not believe it. We do not believe what we know’ [translated by author].

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15. Ibid at 54.

16. Ibid.

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18. States/provinces and municipal governments particularly.

19. Kirsten Engel, “State and Local Climate Change Initiatives: What Is Motivating State and Local Governments to Address a Global Problem and What Does This Say about Federalism and Environmental Law?” (2006) 38:4 Urban Lawyer 1015.

20. Paris Agreement, 2016. Daniel Bodansky, “The Paris Climate Change Agreement: A New Hope?” (2016) 110 Am J Int’l L.

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24. Ibid at 990.

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29. Ibid.

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38. Klabbers, supra note 4.

39. Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, supra note 26 at 273.

40. Luhmann, Law as a Social System, supra note 33 at 94; Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, supra note 26 at 27.

41. Luhmann, Law as a Social System, supra note 33 at 114, 469.

42. Luhmann, Ökologische Kommunikation, supra note 32.

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44. Ebbesson, supra note 25 at 416-17.

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48. JB Ruhl, “In Defense of Ecosystem Services” (2015) 32:1 Pace Envtl L Rev 306.

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51. Teubner, Law as an Autopoietic System, supra note 49 at 32 ff.

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53. An important mode of action for civil society organizations is naming and shaming.

54. E.g., eco-labelling.

55. E.g., assessment of exposure to liability for ecological damage.

56. E.g., industry standards; assessment of risks posed by process and production methods.

57. E.g., FTSE4good.

58. Personal communication, ca 2009.