Locating Nature
Making and Unmaking International Law

Examines how international law perpetuates global environmental injustice and how the system can be fundamentally reworked to address ecological crises.

Usha Natarajan (Edited by), Julia Dehm (Edited by)

9781108497268, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 September 2022

270 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.74 kg

'This tour de force captures the theoretical and practical challenges for all of international law to understand our relationship with nature better. This book is a thorough collection that will push international lawyers in all fields in new and necessary directions.' Michael Fakhri, Professor of Law, University of Oregon; United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food

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.

Introduction: where is the environment? Locating nature in international law Usha Natarajan and Julia Dehm
Part I. Locating Nature in International Law: Towards New Thinking: 1. Locating nature: making and unmaking international law Usha Natarajan and Kishan Khoday
2. From classical liberalism to neoliberalism: explaining the contradictions in the international environmental law project Hélène Mayrand
3. Reconfiguring environmental governance in the green economy: extraction, stewardship and natural capital Julia Dehm
Part II. Unmaking International Law: 4. Appropriating nature: commerce, property and the commodification of nature in the Law of Nations Ileana Porras
5. Reflections on a political ecology of sovereignty: engaging international law and 'the map' Tyler McCreary and Vanessa Lamb
6. The maps of international law: perceptions of nature in the classification of territory beyond the state Karin Mickelson
7. Denaturalising the concept of territory in international law Cait Storr
8. Who do we think we are? Human rights in a time of ecological change Usha Natarajan
9. Law, labour and landscape in a just transition Adrian A. Smith and Dayna Nadine Scott
Part III. Alternatives and Remakings: 10. Three enclosures of international law: commoning premises, processes and aims Darina Petrova and Tomaso Ferrando
11. The mythic environment: ecocosmology and narrative remakings of environmental consciousness Kishan Khoday
12. Law and politics of the human/nature: exploring the foundations and institutions of the 'rights of nature' Roger Merino
13. Narrating nature: climate imaginaries in international law Kathleen Birrell
14. Inter-nation relationships and the natural world as relation Irene Watson
Conclusion: Remaking International Law Usha Natarajan and Julia Dehm.

Subject Areas: International environmental law [LBBP], Public international law [LBB], International law [LB], Law [L], International relations [JPS]