Cancelled due to extreme weather conditions! Book launch: Time and Environmental Law - Telling Nature's Time

Unfortunately, Professor Benjamin Richardson is stuck in Ireland due to extreme weather conditions and this event is therefore cancelled. 

Disciplined by industrial clock time, modern life distances people from nature's biorhythms such as its ecological, evolutionary, and climatic processes.

'Time and Environmental Law' explores how to align law with the ecological 'timescape' and enable humankind to 'tell nature's time'. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform.

Professor Benjamin Richardson, University of Tasmania, will present his book 'Time and Environmental Law - Telling Nature's Time'. Professor Emeritus Hans Christian Bugge from the University of Oslo and Senior Research Scientist Dagmar Hagen from the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research will give prepared comments. This event is open to all interested, but requires registration (see below).
 

Time is fundamental to human affairs, including environmental decision-making. The upheavals of the Anthropocene reflect growing discrepancies between human and natural time scales. The complex rhythms and nested time scales of natural processes (e.g., seasonal, organic, climatic, successional) often bear little resemblance to the invariant, industrial clock time that dominates human society. The law is complicit in this dissonance in myriad ways. It compresses time through fast-track legislation and accelerated resource exploitation. It suffers from temporal inertia, such as ‘grandfathering’ existing activities that limits the law’s responsiveness to changing circumstances. Insouciance about past ecological damage, and neglect of its restoration, are equally serious temporal flaws in the law: sustainably will remain elusive while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired.
 

Applying international and interdisciplinary perspectives on these issues, Time and Environmental Law

  • Explores how to align law with the ecological 'timescape' and enable humankind to 'tell nature's time'. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.
  • Advances knowledge about how time affects the quality of environmental decision-making and provides recommendations for reform of environmental law and policy, helping scholars and students of environmental law to understand the limitations of current approaches and why global environmental decline continues
  • Highlights the importance of ecological restoration for good environmental governance, helping practitioners of ecological restoration understand how the legal system can facilitate restoration
  • Incorporates diverse, multi-disciplinary perspectives into the analysis of environmental law in practice, appealing to readers from diverse fields in understanding the role of environmental law
     

The book is now available at Cambridge University Press.

Program and registration

16:00 - 16:30 Welcome and presentation by Professor Benjamin Richardson

16:30 - 16:45 Comment by Senior Research Scientist Dagmar Hagen

16:45 - 17:00 Comment by Professor emeritus Hans Christian Bugge

17:00 - 17:30 Questions and discussion

17:30 - 18:00 Refreshments and further discussions

 

Please register by 13 October.

Organizer

SMART
Published June 20, 2017 12:59 PM - Last modified Oct. 16, 2018 10:51 AM