A quest for agency in the Anthropocene: Law and environmental movements in Southeast Asia

• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Author: Agung Wardana
• Date: 01 April 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12467

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

A quest for agency in the Anthropocene: Law and

environmental movements in Southeast Asia

Agung Wardana

1,2

1

Faculty of Law, Universitas Gadjah Mada,

Yogyakarta

2

Humboldt Fellow, Max Planck Institute for

Comparative Public Law and International Law,

Heidelberg, Germany

Correspondence

Agung Wardana, Faculty of Law, Universitas

Gadjah Mada, Indonesia.

Email: made.wardana@ugm.ac.id

Abstract

The Anthropocene questions the very foundation of environmental law. Many legal

scholars have proposed directions on how environmental law should be transformed

to respond to complex challenges in the new geological epoch. However, they tend

to avoid questions about which social actors should be regarded as the agents of

change to bring about such a transformation. This article addresses the question of

agency by considering the experience of Southeast Asia. By employing a comparative

perspective, this article reveals that environmental movements are a major agent of

change in the Anthropocene because they have been playing a pivotal role in pro-

gressing environmental law in the region. However, despite their importance in the

region, environmental movements have persistently been confronted by intimidation,

repression and even murder.

1|INTRODUCTION

The Earth is entering a new geological epoch, known as theAnthropo-

cene, referringto the age of humankind in whichhumans have changed

the planet significantly.

1

The simplest wayto understand the Anthropo-

cene is in termsof its scale and system.

2

The changes broughtabout by

the human speciesdo not just materialize at the national or global level

but on a planetary scale, affecting the Earth system, including the geo-

logical composition of the Earth, climatic patterns, the Earth surface

and also the oceans.

3

Following Hamilton and others, the

Anthropocene here refers to ‘an even wider notion of human impact

on the planet, including transformations of the landscape, urbanisation,

species extinctions, resource extraction and waste dumping, as well as

disruptionto natural processes such as the nitrogencycle’.

4

The concept of the Anthropocene has been introduced by scien-

tists to capture the complexity of our contemporary environmental

problems, which occur on a planetary scale. According to Thomas and

colleagues, the Anthropocene needs to be understood from a multi-

disciplinary perspective: While Earth system scientists may have

expertise on the natural dimension of the Anthropocene, they are ill-

equipped to explain its social dimensions.

5

It is up to social scientists,

including legal scholars, to explain the social dimensions of this plane-

tary issue. Thus, the Anthropocene should be seen as an invitation to

bring together the natural sciences and social sciences.

6

This article is

1

The word ‘Anthropocene’itself was popularized by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning

atmospheric chemist, during a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program in

Mexico. During this meeting, he felt upset because geologists kept calling the geological

epoch in the twenty-first century the ‘Holocene’, referring to the epoch of the Earth that

started around 11,000 years ago. He then told the audience that we were no longer living in

the Holocene but in a new epoch called the Anthropocene. See C Hamilton, C Bonneuil and

F Gemenne, ‘Thinking the Anthropocene’in C Hamilton, C Bonneuil and F Gemenne (eds),

The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis (Routledge 2015) 1; I Angus, Facing the

Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (Monthly Review Press

2016) 2.

2

J Zalasiewicz et al, The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific

Evidence and Current Debate (Cambridge University Press 2019).

3

JA Thomas, M Williams and J Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach

(Polity Press 2020).

4

ibid.

5

Thomas et al (n 3).

6

A Mathews, ‘Anthroplogy and the Anthropocene: Criticisms, Experiments, and

Collaborations’(2020) 49 Annual Review of Anthropology 67.

Received: 28 November 2021 Accepted: 20 September 2022

DOI: 10.1111/reel.12467

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

© 2022 The Author. Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.

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