ABSTRACT
The Greek god Apollo empowered Cassandra to know the future in exchange for her love for him, but when she rejected him, he cursed her by making it so nobody would believe her. Those revealing ‘inconvenient truths’ (Gore, 2006) about the growing global ecological crisis often face Cassandra’s dilemma (AtKisson, 1999). Scientists are constantly buttressing their consensus (Oreskes and Conway, 2010) that uncompromising ecological boundaries constrain the human economy. Beyond these limits, the climate changes, nutrients overwhelm ecosystems or biodiversity is lost to such an extreme that the ecological context for the human enterprise irreversibly and catastrophically moves into a new systemic state (Rockström et al., 2009). According to many metrics, human society is already crossing these boundaries (Speth, 2008; Rockström et al., 2009; Hails, 2008). Yet these narratives are routinely ignored, resisted or drowned out in public and political discourse, such that legal and other normative regimes that would confront these dangerous trends either fail to emerge or are rejected. Consequently, the global community’s de facto governance structure (Brown and Garver, 2009, p19) lacks legal and policy regimes that would allow hard ecological truths to carry determinative weight.
