{"title":"Book review: Sébastien Jodoin, Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate: REDD+ and Indigenous and Community Rights in Indonesia and Tanzania (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2017) 252 pp.","authors":"B. Mayer","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2019.02.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.05","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48451527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Harnessing the transformative potential of the constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment in the context of corporate environmental damage in Kenya: a critical perspective","authors":"Rose Mwanza","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2019.02.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.04","url":null,"abstract":"Corporate environmental damage in Kenya manifests as a complex mix of humanitarian and ecological harms superimposed over serious environmental governance challenges. The existing legal framework is neither a sufficient deterrent to prevent the occurrence of harm, nor does it offer optimal remedies whenever harm occurs. The limitations inherent in law are primarily because laws are designed to reflect an economic rationality that prioritizes economic growth and profit maximization above all else. Even in cases where a causal relationship between such a rationality and the design of law cannot be ascertained, the limitations of law ultimately inure to the benefit of corporate perpetrators of harm. As a result, the law facilitates the externalization of the costs of environmental damage to the advantage of corporate perpetrators. The constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment stands as law's response to this problem. Drawing on insights from critical theories of human rights, this article argues that the right can be an effective instrument against corporate environmental damage if it is construed in a manner that prioritizes maximum protection of the well-being of humans and ecosystems. Constructing the right in this way assumes that the new norm is itself a reflection of a new rationality, constituted by a set of values different from those that have played a predominant role in shaping legal and institutional responses to environmental damage so far. These values should guide courts, administrators and legislators in the exercise of their respective environmental protection duties.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41308233","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editorial: Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility","authors":"Anna Grear","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2019.02.00","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.00","url":null,"abstract":"Despite the differences between the articles published in this edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the themes of appropriation, technical apparatuses (both material and discursive) and tensions concerning the uneven imposition of environmental damage and risk are either explicitly or implicitly present. The various articles share a sense – moreover – of how important it is to search for ways to construct responsibility for the imposition of such risk and damage. The Anthropocene climate crisis also presses unevenly into view: sometimes overtly addressed, at other times the inescapable background material situation against which all struggles for accountability and ‘responsibilisation’ (as Lorraine Code might put it) must now take place. The articles here, taken together, raise complex and important matters. In the collisions and convergences between the authors’ contributions, a whole continent of possibilities, critiques and lines of thought emerge. One identifiable narrative arc (there may be others) moves along a tangled track between the ‘ecologised appropriations’ of the Anthropocene (Pottage); the responsibilisation of eco-robotics (eco-robots are emergent forms, arguably, of techno-appropriation) (Donhauser); appropriative dynamics of Eurocentric legal and scientific epistemologies (Townsend); and the tensions between appropriative neoliberal economistic law and the constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment in Kenya (Mwanza). The edition opens with Alain Pottage’s thought-provoking reflection on ‘Holocene jurisprudence’. Set against the geological identification of ‘the Anthropocene’, Pottage frames Carl Schmitt’s Nomos De Erde (Nomos of the Earth) as ‘the last flourish of Holocene jurisprudence’. Among the multiple themes emerging in Pottage’s article are the distinctively Anthropocene entanglements between geology and the social sciences; the non-naturalistic ‘general ecology’ marking the Anthropocene; the equivocal place of land as the originary site of appropriative claims, and Anthropocene transmutations of appropriation as a persistent, inherently political, dynamic. Appropriation, Pottage argues, for all available jurisprudences of Anthropocene responsibility, can no longer merely be read as appropriation of land in the traditional Lockean sense, for appropriation also takes place in multiple forms of spoliation (such as the pollutant ‘atmosphere-appropriations of the industrial powers’). In the Anthropocene, appropriation is now an ecologized process for which ‘ecology’ can no longer be just a designation placed over ‘nature’: the Anthropocene is marked by a ‘general ecology’ as the contingent effect of a diverse assemblage of ‘agencies, media, discourses and temporalities’. Pottage positions Schmitt’s ‘geojurisprudence’ as a","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.00","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45719399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silencing, consultation and indigenous descriptions of the world","authors":"D. Townsend","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2019.02.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.03","url":null,"abstract":"The Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights, following the approach in key international human rights texts, have emphasized the importance of procedural rights in the protection of indigenous rights to territory and to cultural identity. In particular, the Court and Commission have focused on rights to consultation in a range of cases in which indigenous peoples have challenged mining, logging and other extractive activities on their territories.\u0000\u0000Consultation processes are often expected to serve a wide range of purposes in the protection of indigenous rights and interests in territory. Consultation is a means of informing a community about a project, but also a process through which an agreement can be reached between the community and the State about the use of territory or the sharing of benefits. In this article, I focus on consultation's role as part of the impact assessment process.\u0000\u0000In determining the impact that a project might have on indigenous territory, the Court and Commission have found that the State must assess both the environmental and cultural impacts of a plan or activity. Consultation is a necessary part of the identification of the impacts of an activity and ensuring that the State has all the necessary information prior to making decisions to grant concessions over indigenous territory.\u0000\u0000However, the Court and Commission's interpretation of indigenous testimony in consultation processes could undermine the role of such testimony in the assessment of environmental impacts, and might silence indigenous participants rather than ensure their meaningful participation. With reference to the idea of illocutionary silencing, taken from feminist speech act theory, I argue that the Court and Commission have interpreted indigenous testimony about the environment as being claims about the cultural impacts of disputed activities or plans, and not as claims about the environmental impacts. In other words, when indigenous community members have offered descriptions of their territories and surrounding environments, such testimony has been treated not as descriptions of the environment but as reports of cultural beliefs and practices. As a result, indigenous input in regard to the environmental impacts of a project or plan can be overlooked. In this article I argue that this failure to recognize indigenous accounts of the environment means that these communities are silenced through the consultation process and denied the opportunity to be informed about all relevant impacts.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46746395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Holocene jurisprudence","authors":"A. Pottage","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2019.02.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.01","url":null,"abstract":"We are now accustomed to thinking of the Holocene as an epoch that we have left behind. But from what perspective do we close the Holocene and begin describing the Anthropocene? Academic disciplines have their own geology: epistemic or medial strata, sediments or condensations, which condition the apprehension and communication of fresh insight. The phrase ‘Holocene jurisprudence’ draws attention to a particular epistemic sediment: the figure of appropriation or ‘taking’, which is reactivated in many critical commentaries on the Anthropocene. And if, speaking figuratively, one were to identify an index fossil that compellingly expresses the epistemic traditions and potentialities that are sedimented into the Euro-American figure of appropriation, then Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth would be a good candidate.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.4337/jhre.2019.02.01","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45290656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inter-generational rights, animal rights, and rights of nature and ecosystems","authors":"Atapattu Sumudu, Schapper Andrea","doi":"10.4324/9781315193397-15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315193397-15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88064118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pros and cons of a human rights-based approach to environmental protection","authors":"Atapattu Sumudu, Schapper Andrea","doi":"10.4324/9781315193397-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315193397-3","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73863774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Regional systems of human rights","authors":"Schapper Andrea","doi":"10.4324/9781315193397-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315193397-4","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86380855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Human rights and environmental protection","authors":"Atapattu Sumudu, Schapper Andrea","doi":"10.4324/9781315193397-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315193397-1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2019-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89755692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}