The Prevention of the Sixth Mass Extinction: Socio-Legal Responses to Mitigate the Anthropogenic Crises in Asia and Beyond

Abstract This Special Issue highlights the most recent socio-legal research related to the mitigation, if not the elimination, of the threat of anthropogenic disasters in Asia and beyond. The drafts of these papers were originally presented at the Presidential Session on “The Anthropocene and the Law in Asia” at the Fourth Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) Conference held in the vibrant city of Osaka, Japan in December 2019. The timing of this particular session, the first of its kind to be held at an ALSA Conference, turned out to be somewhat prophetic, in that two anthropogenic catastrophes—the historic zoonotic pandemic and the cataclysmic wild bushfires—had just begun to strike in December in Wuhan, China and in New South Wales, Australia, respectively. The novel coronavirus pandemic would kill more than 1 million people in the following months, after infecting more than 40 million across the globe. The Australian wild bushfires killed and displaced more than 3 billion animals, becoming the worst wildfire ever recorded in the world. Since that last ALSA Conference in December 2019, multiple anthropogenic disasters have hit various regions in Asia and across the world. The papers in this Special Issue examine various impacts of anthropogenic disasters and propose innovative socio-legal strategies to mitigate them. Included are arguments for the proposal of new legal education curricula and innovative pedagogy on environmental law and the exploration of an international multidisciplinary teaching framework in reconsidering and reshaping human-centric legal education. Also proposed is the development of a robust Earth Jurisprudence based on the adoption of the Rights of Nature principles, while moving away from the Euro-American exploitive view of nature as commodified properties. Additionally proposed is the establishment of a land-based, topological jurisprudence that incorporates the nuanced narratives of indigenous voices in dealing with the threat of human-induced ecological and environmental disasters in the years ahead.