Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law

Usha Natarajan · Julia Dehm

sept 2022 · Cambridge University Press

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For those troubled by environmental harm on a global scale and its deeply unequal effects, this book explains how international law structures ecological degradation and environmental injustice while claiming to protect the environment. It identifies how central legal concepts such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development, environment, labour and human rights make inaccurate and unsustainable assumptions about the natural world and systemically reproduce environmental degradation and injustice. To avert socioecological crises, we must not only unpack but radically rework our understandings of nature and its relationship with law. We propose more sustainable and equitable ways to remake law's relationship with nature by drawing on diverse disciplines and sociocultural traditions that have been marginalized within international law. Influenced by Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), postcolonialism and decoloniality, and inspired by Indigenous knowledges, cosmology, mythology and storytelling, this book lays the groundwork for an epistemological shift in the way humans conceptualize the relationship between law and nature.

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Usha Natarajan is Edward W. Said fellow at Columbia University. She is a leader in the TWAIL movement and a founding editor of the TWAIL Review. Her research on environmental justice in the Global South received the International Union for Conservation of Nature Environmental Law Award. With over forty publications, she has led global research grants from the EU and Canada and has worked with the United Nations.

Julia Dehm is senior lecturer at La Trobe University Law School. Her research addresses international and domestic climate and environmental law, natural resources, human rights, economic inequality and social justice. She is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment and author of Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge, 2021).