This chapter introduces the reflection in the book and the work of the ESG Workgroup on the Representations and Rights of the Environment (ESGRREW), with its intercultural and interdisciplinary process of Research & Dialogue: a critical appraisal of how humankind conceive its relationship with the environment, towards a clear vision of how to apprehend it in law and governance. The reflection takes heed of the change in vision in different fields of knowledge and the message of Indigenous peoples with other critical voices regarding humankind’s present predicament. It champions social and environmental justice, and highlights the crisis of representations and perception of our world. Rekindling the conscience of diversity of languages, cultures and modes of knowing and being, it advocates a wide and relational approach, considering lived experience. It contends that we need to remove ‘barriers to understanding’, create and nurture a common space towards a ‘new common sense’. Reconnecting with other legal traditions will contribute to rethinking legal frameworks and practices for a new legal consciousness.

Ireland was in a rush to embrace electrification in the 1930s and 1940s, as it was digitalisation in the post-Celtic Tiger age of Yahoo and Google. In the face of this state-led dedication to light and currency, Irish literature has consistently found ways to restore stubborn materiality to the semiotic field. This depends on what this chapter calls its tradition of stupidity. Reclaimed as a device within literary texts, ‘stupidity’ is an instructive and often comic mode of emphasising embodiment and drawing attention to a persistent lack of connection. Moving through several literary examples taken from the mid-twentieth century to the present day (Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones), this chapter suggests three themes by which this stupidity is registered as a complicating factor within an electric modernity set adrift on the neoliberal current: emigration, constitutional politics, and ecology. The purpose of the examples offered is to show how disconnection functions, thematically and formally, within a networked imaginary, and how it might be repositioned within new discourses oriented around ecological crisis.

This edited collection takes initial steps in a journey to understand better the relationship between international law and nature. We discover how international law systemically reproduces ecological injustice, and we explore the potential for equitable and sustainable disciplinary remakings. Specifically, we identify the inaccurate and harmful assumptions about nature underpinning conceptualizations of sovereignty, jurisdiction, territory, development, labour and human rights. To productively reimagine our discipline, we turn to Indigenous legal traditions, TWAIL, postcolonialism and decoloniality; to political ecology and ecocosmology; and to mythmaking, storytelling and song lines for inspiration. We hope other concepts and traditions will inform this ongoing endeavour. Even as international law continues to structure ecological harm, we see hope in growing transnational solidarity and alliances between the poor and subaltern classes that are challenging legal systems with better understandings of the relationship between nature and law.

This chapter traces the defects of the Chinese corporate-political ecosystem to a combination of lingering Maoist/Communist political practices and a short-term capitalist profit-maximizing mindset that was introduced during the Reform period. The chapter shows the devastating impact of this contradictory ideology on the environment, which has only worsened over the past three decades of reform due to self-interested alliances among local government officials, state-owned enterprises, and private corporations placing economic development and profit-making over the health of their surrounding citizens and natural environment. The result has been a massive ecological and public health crisis and increasing social tensions that threaten the Chinese Communist Party's hold on power.

There is a multiplicity or pluriverse of modes or families of democracy and citizenship on this planet, from diverse types of participatory democracy to Gaia or Earth democracy. In response to the ecological and democratic crises, the aim of this volume is to disclose and survey five modes of democracy: Indigenous democracies, Local/global participatory democracies, representative democracies, international/global democracies, and Gaia democracies. We study how they are enacted and the ways in which they interact in order to show how they can coordinate and cooperate democratically in response to the ecosocial crises we face. We call this integration of democratic diversity “joining hands” and explicate six ways of joining hands in practice. The Introduction includes overviews of each chapter.

This part concludes several of the key patterns in the League’s environmental regime. I use this opportunity to discuss some of the broader implications of this study for international environmental policymaking.

Next to the techno-environmental and legal questions covered in each chapter, the environmental story reveals the complex institutional framework of the League. I claim that the shift to internationalism was not only reflected in the substantive issues that were at stake. The interwar environmental regime was primarily based on a procedural and legal routine that supported the environmental challenges that confronted the League. The League brought something completely different into the table. The environmental law missions that I uncover show how and to which extent the League shifted these discussions and kept them going, thanks to its regular institutional routine. It was the League’s systematic – almost bureaucratic – institutional work that triggered these discussions, squeezing them into different modes of operation. In this way, these issues developed their own dynamic as part of international law.

Moreover, and although the League failed in many of its actions, including the environmental challenges, I will argue that given the layered structure of international environmental law (and its history), the interwar period should not be overlooked: not in terms of comparative legal history, and not in terms of its influence and links to the current issues of the ecological crisis.

Data-driven approaches to environmental governance, such as those promoted by the planetary boundaries concept, permit the rapid circulation of actionable information on environmental performance through transnational networks operating within the political economy. Some of the most promising approaches emerge from structural cuopling between science and economics, largely bypassing law and politics, and operating in cognitive, rather than normative, terms. Yet a purely cognitive global ecological law, offering no possibility of stabilisation of expectations, would ultimately be ineffective. I argue that a role for law emerges if the normative dimensions of the condensation of complex scientific insights into metrics with a high degree of resonance in the political economy are taken seriously. Law must do more than transduce scientific data into metrics, as though scientists have unmediated knowledge of Earth systems. Rather, the normative dimensions of scientific knowledge-production, notably in processes of judging, arguing, and persuading, create opportunities for the development of norms governing the processes of condensing and translating scientific knowledge of ecological risk into signal of economic risk. As Bruno Latour argues, responses to ecological crisis ought not to be conceived of as a new form of jus naturalis, containing norms and standards dictated directly to humankind by the non-human world; instead, what is required is a jus gentium that accepts the unknowability of the non-human world, and the mediated – and therefore highly normative – channels through which knowledge of that world is derived.