1st Edition
Legal and Political Challenges of Governing the Environment and Climate Change Ruling Nature
The environment has not always been protected by law. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that ‘the environment’ came to be understood as an entity in need of special care, and the law-politics duo firmly fixed its focus on this issue.
In this book Wickham and Goodie tell the story of how law and politics first came upon the environment as an object in need of special attention. They outline the unlikely intersection of aesthetics and science that made ‘the environment’ into the matter of great concern it is today. The book describes the way private common-law strategies and public-law legislative strategies have approached the task of protecting the environment, and explore the greatest environmental challenge to have so far confronted environmental law and politics; the threat of global climate change. The book offers descriptions of many of the strategies being deployed to meet this challenge and present some troubling assessments of them.
The book will be of great interest to students, teachers, and researchers of environmental law, socio-legal studies, environmental studies, and political theory.
Part 1: Different Discourses of the Environment 1. Moral and Aesthetic Discourses of the Environment 2. Scientific, Political, Economic Discourses of the Environment 3. Legal Discourses of the Environment Part 2: Climate Change - Refiguring Environmental Legal Understanding 4. Contemporary Construction of the Environment 5. Ecologically Sustainable Development 6. Risk
Biography
Jo-Ann Goodie is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Murdoch University, Australia.
Gary Wickham is Professor of Sociology at Murdoch University, Australia.
"Structurally the book is very clearly laid out, and stylistically it is consistently dynamic and engaging." - Thomas L. Muinzer, Queen's University Belfast for Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning (2014)]
"The book does not present a critical analysis of the effectiveness of legal political government for tackling environmental problems. Rather, its major contribution, through its description of its origins, is to aid understanding of why this type of government governs the environmental effects of human activities in particular ways and of why it has failed to date to provide an adequate response to environmental degradation." - Dr Olivia Woolley, University of Aberdeen for the Environmental Law Review (2014)
