126
As the still developing field of ecological law matures, it will be important to
ensure that it embodies principles that promote re-embedding people in the places
that nourish them and that severely constrain or abolish remote decisions and policies made without intimate connection to, concern about and knowledge of the local
people and places affected. Contemporary law, including environmental law, too
rarely gets this balance right. In this chapter, the many ways in which contemporary
law is detached from place in harmful ways will be reviewed and the potential for
ecological law to reverse course will be explained.
2 Detachment from Place in Contemporary Law
Contemporary law, including environmental law, is built on worldviews and moral
philosophies that encourage and sanction detachment from place. Building on
themes of human superiority over all other beings in classical Greek and JudeoChristian thought, the ideological separation of humans and nature, with humans
superior to and accorded mastery over nature, firmly took hold of normative constructs like economics and law in the Enlightenment and now dominates thought
systems governing the human-nature relationship around the world (Capra and
Mattei 2015). The exceptions—indigenous worldviews across the globe, Eastern
thought, the theology of St. Francis of Assisi, for example—are important potential
antidotes and seeds for transformation, but they have had little effect reining in the
key drivers of catastrophic ecological change in the modern globalized economy.
The historical record of humanity’s social metabolism, in particular the growing
divide between where people live and the often remote ecosystems that sustain
them, aligns with this human-nature ideological binary. Especially in Europe, the
early modern era from around 1400 to 1800 was a period of externalization of the
means of providing for a growing population as local sources became fully or overexploited (Richards 2003). European colonization of much of the Americas, Africa
and Asia in this period was a matter of finding both new sources of material and
energy—including slaves—to sustain Europeans at home and new places for
Europeans to settle. The spirit of conquest and domination with which European
monarchs undertook to colonize faraway places, sometimes relying on papal bulls
they read as granting permission to assert sovereignty over “discovered” nonChristian lands with a view to converting any inhabitants to Christianity (Romanus
Pontifex 1455, Inter Caetera 1493), largely precluded any real notion of attachment
to the places and people there. The quasi-legal privateers who took part in this phase
of land and resource grabbing evolved into today’s legal persons called corporations, many of whom continue to engage in modern, globalized land and resource
grabbing (Korten 2009). Condemnation of the brutality of colonization began as
early as the sixteenth century, notably by the Spanish Dominicans Bartolomé de las
Casas in Mexico and Francisco de Vitoria in Spain (Behr 2010), and the Doctrine of
Discovery is increasingly disavowed or repudiated now (Tsilhqot’in Nation v.
British Columbia 2014). Nonetheless, the detachment of people from place and
G. Garver
As the still developing field of ecological law matures, it will be important to
ensure that it embodies principles that promote re-embedding people in the places
that nourish them and that severely constrain or abolish remote decisions and policies made without intimate connection to, concern about and knowledge of the local
people and places affected. Contemporary law, including environmental law, too
rarely gets this balance right. In this chapter, the many ways in which contemporary
law is detached from place in harmful ways will be reviewed and the potential for
ecological law to reverse course will be explained.
2 Detachment from Place in Contemporary Law
Contemporary law, including environmental law, is built on worldviews and moral
philosophies that encourage and sanction detachment from place. Building on
themes of human superiority over all other beings in classical Greek and JudeoChristian thought, the ideological separation of humans and nature, with humans
superior to and accorded mastery over nature, firmly took hold of normative constructs like economics and law in the Enlightenment and now dominates thought
systems governing the human-nature relationship around the world (Capra and
Mattei 2015). The exceptions—indigenous worldviews across the globe, Eastern
thought, the theology of St. Francis of Assisi, for example—are important potential
antidotes and seeds for transformation, but they have had little effect reining in the
key drivers of catastrophic ecological change in the modern globalized economy.
The historical record of humanity’s social metabolism, in particular the growing
divide between where people live and the often remote ecosystems that sustain
them, aligns with this human-nature ideological binary. Especially in Europe, the
early modern era from around 1400 to 1800 was a period of externalization of the
means of providing for a growing population as local sources became fully or overexploited (Richards 2003). European colonization of much of the Americas, Africa
and Asia in this period was a matter of finding both new sources of material and
energy—including slaves—to sustain Europeans at home and new places for
Europeans to settle. The spirit of conquest and domination with which European
monarchs undertook to colonize faraway places, sometimes relying on papal bulls
they read as granting permission to assert sovereignty over “discovered” nonChristian lands with a view to converting any inhabitants to Christianity (Romanus
Pontifex 1455, Inter Caetera 1493), largely precluded any real notion of attachment
to the places and people there. The quasi-legal privateers who took part in this phase
of land and resource grabbing evolved into today’s legal persons called corporations, many of whom continue to engage in modern, globalized land and resource
grabbing (Korten 2009). Condemnation of the brutality of colonization began as
early as the sixteenth century, notably by the Spanish Dominicans Bartolomé de las
Casas in Mexico and Francisco de Vitoria in Spain (Behr 2010), and the Doctrine of
Discovery is increasingly disavowed or repudiated now (Tsilhqot’in Nation v.
British Columbia 2014). Nonetheless, the detachment of people from place and
G. Garver