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.

With the rise of global governance, the concept of authority has become central to capture the power of non-state actors to shape the everyday making of world politics. Such power draws on intersubjective schemes that make non-state actors be perceived as being in authority or an authority. The chapter argues that the association of practice and authority moves the boundaries of the field. Unlike the Weberian conception of authority that pre-defines various sources from which actors can draw, scholars working from a practice perspective have tackled the process of authority. They thus have substituted a substantialist ontology with a relational one. The chapter details three main contributions of this scholarship. First, scholars working from a Bourdieusian perspective have investigated the claims to authority, which sheds light on the social struggles underpinning the construction of hierarchy in international relations. Drawing on the sociology of knowledge, a second trend of scholars has looked at the construction of the object of authority, which allows to understand the historical construction of expertise. Finally, a third trend of research, inspired by governmentalities studies, has opened up the new empirical field of authoritative practices, which changed the analytical focus from institutions to the making of governance.

Approaching food systems today as a global pharmakon can help advance an Environmental Humanities response to the risks and unknowns of food. Whether it is the difficulty fish have in distinguishing microplastics from plankton, or the trouble humans who live in urban food deserts have finding fresh edibles, food in the early twenty-first century carries unprecedented threats of undernourishment, toxicity and death alongside its promise of life. Paradoxically, the ethics and politics emerging in response to the pharmakon of food may not always involve attempts to purify or certify it “free” of social and environmental ills. One alternative is to tell stories about “food-power” that highlight the agency of other species within a relational ontology that reveals human control, including efforts to control for food safety, to be a fiction. On their own, stories of food-power cannot confront the “power to devour” through which some humans assert their exceptionalism and domination. Gutsy struggles against food injustices by colonized and Indigenous people also show that food is neither an object nor a subject but a multispecies relationship protected through both story and action.