The concept of environmental rule of law plays a pivotal role in enhancing the effectiveness of environmental governance by integrating principles of the rule of law into environmental legislation with a nuanced application. Emerging from the recognition of the distinctiveness of environmental law and the stark implementation gap, it seeks to move environmental laws beyond mere legislation to their effective implementation, compliance, and enforcement. Formally acknowledged within the UN system in 2013, the roots of the principles of the rule of law, albeit sporadic, trace back to the 1970s within the realm of environmental law. Gradually, the concept has significantly evolved, gaining global prominence, institutionalization, and ultimately becoming a fundamental guiding pillar in the 2019 Fifth Montevideo Programme for the Development and Periodic Review of Environmental Law. This chapter chronicles the evolution of the concept, delineating its journey from scattered elements to a robust holistic framework. Cognizant that the concept continues to evolve, the chapter underscores critical issues that demand further research to maximize the benefits of the environmental rule of law.

In this chapter, Nicole Seymour and Zia Salim observe that two paradigms dominate the cultural imagination of Los Angeles’s environmental conditions. One is a suspicion that the city’s “nature” is troublingly artificial – a water-hungry metropolis imposed on what is often erroneously described as a desert. The other is a notion of LA as environmentally extreme, disastrous, and even apocalyptic, not only in its wildfires but also in tectonic activity, drought, and flood. These paradigms often overlap, human action reaping a harvest of natural disaster. Through a capacious literary archive that stretches chronologically from Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight (1927) to Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun (2021), however, Seymour and Salim find that LA literature does not always propagate these twin paradigms uncritically; rather, they are often challenged and complexified.

Protecting human rights and safeguarding the environment, along with maintaining peace and security, are fundamental values of modern international society. The first two topics emerged as matters of international concern several decades apart, and the earlier development of human rights law encouraged international lawyers and activists as early as the 1972 Stockholm Conference to explore and attempt to understand the interrelationship between human rights and environmental protection. As this understanding has grown, the two fields have increasingly interacted. Since the Stockholm Conference, constitutional provisions and related litigation on environmental rights have spread around the globe. At the same time, differences in goals and priorities have demonstrated the obstacles to merging them or integrating either subject entirely into the framework of the other. The current focus on climate change has been accompanied by new efforts to enforce environmental goals that impact the enjoyment of human rights.

Sustainable development is a key concept in international politics that in a remarkably short period of time has also become firmly established in international law. Various multilateral conferences have been instrumental in this process – most notably, the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. While the 1972 Stockholm Declaration did not yet employ the very term of sustainable development, the idea of balancing environmental conservation and human development served no doubt as a central theme at the conference and in its outcome documents. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission introduced sustainable development as the key concept for this balancing act into world politics. Subsequently, sustainable development became anchored in various sources of international law, particularly normative UN resolutions, treaties, and judicial decisions, even to such an extent that the contours of an overarching international sustainable development law can be identified. However, its cradle remains in Stockholm in 1972.

This chapter concerns international environmental law. It commences with a consideration of an argued human right to a clean environment and the increasing case law on this issue. The relationship between economic development and environmental protection is also addressed, before the key question of state responsibility is surveyed. The appropriate standard, whether or not actual damage is caused, the question of transboundary harm arising from hazardous activities, environmental impact assessments, the precautionary and polluter-pays principles are examined before turning to the range of international treaties on this topic. The question of atmospheric pollution is addressed before the chapter turns to a consideration of climate change and the various international instruments concerning this, including the important Paris Agreement of 2015. Environmental issues and outer space are then discussed, followed by a section on international watercourses and one on ultra-hazardous activities. Questions as to the requirements for the provision of information and assistance are covered.

This introductory chapter presents the paradoxical status of ageing today: most people wish to live long, yet nobody really wants to get old… Ageing still appears as a scary, unknown country. The present book, concluding almost ten years of research on ageing, aspires to bring a fresh look on what becoming older may entail. It has a double aim. First, as a basic goal, it proposes a new theory of psychological development in older age. Second, it highlights the importance of the environments in which people age, and the role of well-thought-out policies to support development with age; it has thus a more applied goal. This introductory chapter then presents the outline of the volume.

Study of the material remains of Greek and Roman antiquity played a key role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emergence of the modern disciplinary formation of Classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient Mediterranean world. Over the same period, it was also central to the development of racial thought in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnology, and historical anthropology. After articulating a conception of race that, following Stuart Hall and Noémie Ndiaye, treats it as a ‘sliding signifier’ drawing upon an archive or repertoire of racial tropes, this chapter discusses how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of ‘art’, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the ‘Age of Discovery’ and the European ‘Enlightenment’. It explores the relation of classical art historiography to other racializing discourses of difference along three key axes: ‘Culture’, ‘Differentiation’, and ‘Beauty’, attending to the role of environmental or climate theory, heredity, and physiognomy in emerging theories that sought to explain the diversity of ancient and modern peoples as evidenced by their visual and material productions.

This chapter introduces the reader to how the oil industry mobilizes political support from publics. It argues that historically, the sector has shied away from grassroots politics, or employed short-lived, financially secretive front groups. However, today this is changing. Oil firms’ contemporary outreach is apt to take the form of visible, far-reaching, and long-term campaigns that openly tout partnership between companies and citizens. This style of organizing troubles the neat binary between grassroots politics and corporate public relations. To address this, the chapter suggests we think of all political mobilization as “manufactured publics,” emphasizing the strategizing, labor, and mixture of interests inherent in all contentious political efforts. This theoretical lens allows us to explore both the affective realities of people who join pro-oil groups and the corporate interests that shape these campaigns.

This chapter explores strategy as a key driver of organizational design, emphasizing that structure should align with strategic intent. It introduces four strategic archetypes: reactors (no clear strategy), defenders (efficiency-focused), prospectors (innovation-driven), and analyzers (balancing both). It also discusses digital business strategy, showing how AI and digitalization reshape decision-making, operations, and innovation. Sustainable strategy is introduced, integrating economic, environmental, and social goals (People, Planet, Profit) to enhance resilience and competitiveness. The chapter concludes with strategy misfits – misalignments between strategy and goals – and the need to adjust one or the other. It ends by addressing how the environment influences strategic choices.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

Global environmental change is on the rise and has detrimental effects for most humans. Violent conflict is also increasing. The environment is almost always a victim of conflict, and conflict activities are always shaped by the environment. Understanding the interactions between the environment and conflict is difficult because of their complexity. This chapter reviews the broad literature on the environment and conflict and introduces the analytical framework that forms the core of this book.

Victorian literature translated the systemic organization of extraction-based globalization into aesthetic structure. This chapter shows how literary forms like the multiplot novel and lyric poem strained and changed shape to account for the world-spanning mechanisms of imperialism, colonialism, and an extraction-based fossil capitalism that reshaped “the environment” across the nineteenth-century British imperium. Describing a “supply-chain sublime,” it shows how the improvement and development valorized by John Stuart Mill (and before him, John Locke) had material corollaries in scarred and abandoned zones that rarely focalize canonical works. Seen in this context, exhibits like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873), and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) recode extractive globalization into signals we can detect, but only with an “environmental” reading practice that construes ecological matters to inhere in sociopolitical conditions, and that sees environmental issues as finally moral ones too.

Chapter 3 discusses the critical potential of environmental synecdoche in works of fiction that question the autonomy of human agency. Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (2014) mock fantasies of control by portraying humans as inseparable from multi-scalar assemblages and symbiotic associations. I read these novels as experiments in the cognitive modelling of agency at unfamiliar scales: both the microscale of a postgenomic imaginary and the macroscale of planet and species demanded by Anthropocene awareness. These fictions, I suggest, explore the difficulty of reconciling environmental responsibility with the dispersal of agency inherent to biomedical and ecological perspectives. Both novels experiment with multi-scalar tropes as a means of modelling agency at unfamiliar scales and enabling environmental response-ability. In each narrative, I contrast the lure of analogical images with the poetics of critical synecdoche, which engages productively with the complexity of diffuse environmental agency.