This chapter contends that international law is structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. Many of international law’s basic concepts, such as sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development and human rights, have evolved in trajectories unsuited to perceiving or respecting ecological limits. International law treats nature as a resource for wealth generation and environmental degradation as an economic externality to be managed through special regimes. This chapter traces the coevolution of such assumptions about nature alongside formative disciplinary concepts, arguing that such understandings have been central to making international law, and that the discipline helps universalise and normalise them. Thus, to engage with environmental challenges, disciplinary tenets would have to evolve in directions that radically transform the nature of law.

This chapter explores the relationship between human rights and the environment. It begins by asking ‘who we think we are’ to understand the forms of subjecthood and subjectivity produced by human rights. It argues that human rights normalize a series of false conceptions about our collective self that have detrimental social and ecological consequences. The chapter next examines the question of ‘where we think we are’, probing the ontological rift between humans as subjects of rights and ‘the environment’ as the repository of resources with which to satisfy human entitlements. The chapter challenges human rights as a hubristic organizing category and observes that the ‘who’ and ‘where’ questions, artificially separated in the chapter, serve to show that the way humans treat each other is inextricable from the way we treat nature. To undo relationships of mastery, ownership, and violence between the subjects and objects of human rights law, projects for human wellbeing and environmental struggles need to engage with and understand each other outside the unproductive rubric of rights discourse.

This edited collection takes initial steps in a journey to understand better the relationship between international law and nature. We discover how international law systemically reproduces ecological injustice, and we explore the potential for equitable and sustainable disciplinary remakings. Specifically, we identify the inaccurate and harmful assumptions about nature underpinning conceptualizations of sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development, labour and human rights. To productively reimagine our discipline, we turn to Indigenous legal traditions, TWAIL, postcolonialism and decoloniality; to political ecology and ecocosmology; and to mythmaking, storytelling and song lines for inspiration. We hope other concepts and traditions will inform this ongoing endeavour. Even as international law continues to structure ecological harm, we see hope in growing transnational solidarity and alliances between the poor and subaltern classes that are challenging legal systems with better understandings of the relationship between nature and law.

Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, desertification and increasing pollution and toxicity of the air, water and land: Uncontainable by national borders, these are quintessentially global concerns for which peoples and states have turned to international law for solutions. This edited collection asks how international lawyers have understood the environment: What exactly is it and how do international lawyers purport to govern it? These seemingly straightforward questions have the potential to unmake our discipline through destabilizing formative assumptions about the separation between subjects and objects of governance, between the social and the natural, and between the human and non-human. We explain in this introductory chapter that reexamining international law assumptions about the natural world is not mere theoretical speculation. It is an urgent and necessary step for addressing pressing environmental challenges.

We live in a time of ecological change. Climate change is occurring alongside other interrelated environmental transformations. We are amid the biggest disruption to Earth’s nitrogen cycle in two and a half billion years, and a mass extinction of species for the first time in sixty-six million years. When it comes to climate, the last time there was this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three and a half million years ago. Change on a scale unprecedented in human history combined with our inability to stem these trends thus far contributes to a sense of being at a tipping point – that unless these challenges are addressed effectively and soon, human life will become irrevocably unpredictable and volatile.

The concept of environmental justice has its origins in the United States in the 1980s when it was used to describe the unequal impact of industrial pollution on racial minorities. From these beginnings, over the last four decades the idea has blossomed, expanding both geographically and historically to encompass variegated environmental struggles worldwide, including those from centuries past. Why does this concept have such resonance and wherein lies its usefulness? This chapter examines these questions from the point of view of the Global South. I begin with some background on what is meant by the Global South and by environmental justice. I then use the customary four-pillar formulation of environmental justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, corrective justice, and social justice – to explain the different theoretical and practical ways in which this concept is helpful for understanding environmental struggles across the Global South.