ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene has sparked the imagination of scholars and led to many novel proposals for development and reflection. Law, from this perspective, sits at the vanguard and drives change at the level of the economy and informal sources of power that course through civil society. Perhaps the most emblematic example of this are proposals to alter national constitutions in response to the Anthropocene. Revealing their connection to ecology, this practice is also called eco-constitutionalism. Within the literature, the central contention is that constitutions, as the highest authority in national law, should have a role to play in environmental protection. While Germany and Switzerland led the “greening” of national constitutions they should also be located within a broader global trend in that direction. Materialism, by contrast, is an alternative philosophy which holds that what moves history is the organisation of material life or how human societies subsist and reproduce themselves.
