ABSTRACT
The extensive and increasingly tangible and dangerous effects of climate change on earth's ecological systems have been insufficiently taken up as a jurisprudential theme. Yet these changes will have an impact on some of the main constituents of modern law and government: sovereignty, territory, and property, for example. The “Anthropocene thesis” holds that human activities have caused such major damage to the ecosystem that it has entered a new, human-made, geological period. This chapter assesses the role and limits of modern law under these new circumstances. Has it been, and does it continue to be, complicit in causing global warming? Are the modern state system and capitalist ideas and practices of growth simply incapable of redressing such harms? Do contemporary legal institutions and concepts have the regulatory capacity to address these issues? If not, what new legal imaginaries, beyond the modern, may have to be foregrounded in order to come to terms with this most pressing of human and planetary problems?
