The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, edited by Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, published by Yale University Press, 2013, 512 pp., £20.00, paperback.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/reel.12166
• Date: 01 July 2016
• Published date: 01 July 2016
• Author: Vito De Lucia

The Future of Nature:

Documents of Global

Change, edited by Libby

Robin, Sverker S€

orlin and

Paul Warde, published by

Yale University Press, 2013,

512 pp., £20.00, paperback.

Environmental law is the branch of

law perhaps most permeable to,

and dependent on, other fields of

knowledge. Indeed, concepts, cat-

egories and values of other fields of

knowledge traverse environmental

law in multiple ways and help shape

its very identity. The degree of

receptiveness given to ecological

values and concepts has even been

the measure for evaluating succeed-

ing paradigms of environmental

law.

1

Various strands of environ-

mental ethics also bear heavily on

the identity and normative horizon

of environmental law.

2

Moreover,

largely thanks to these multiple per-

meabilities, environmental law is

increasingly –and perhaps inevit-

ably –‘hot’and contested.

3

The pre-

sent volume offers to be in this

respect a precious resource for envi-

ronmental lawyers and legal schol-

ars ‘for reflection and re-visioning’

(at xii), as the editors explicitly sug-

gest. The breadth of its scope, as

well as the carefully chosen the-

matic areas, delineate important

conceptual genealogies and raise

important questions in relation to

key concepts which are used in legal

discourse and doctrinal interpreta-

tion, though perhaps too often with-

out sufficient critical reflection.

4

The book is conceived of as an

‘archive’(at 4), whose goal is that of

linking the future of nature with the

history of global change science and

to the emergence of a series of key

concepts and themes that traverse

environmental discourse in mul-

tiple and often problematic ways.

Yet the editors do not claim to offer

a‘canon’(at 4), and their particular

‘selections, interpretations [and]

suggestions’(at xii) are but one way

(out of many possible ways) to docu-

ment global change from the per-

spective of historians (indeed, all

editors are historians). The very

choice of an anthology suggests, as

the editors underline, the wish to

start a conversation (‘we don’ttella

single story, but rather allow access

to the stories that shaped us’(at xii)).

The future of nature, the editors

suggest, is dependent on four over-

arching frames that collectively

embody a particular mode of

engagement with both the idea of

nature and the idea of the future.

These four ‘particularly prominent’

(at 6) concepts, which traverse and

give coherence to the entire book,

are: future, prediction, expertise

and environment. Indeed, the

future is a key preoccupation of

modernity, where ‘all that is solid

melts into air’, and is swept away

by progress and change;

5

and of

the Anthropocene, where nature,

entirely submitted to humanity’s

pervasive presence, is a human

environment,

6

and the future (of

both humans and of nature) can be

managed through prediction elabor-

ated by experts. The book is struc-

turally organized in 10 thematic

sections (population; sustainabi-

lity; geographies; environment; eco-

logy; technology; climate; diversity;

measuring; Anthropocene), each of

which presents an introduction, an

anthology of essays (or extracts

thereof) and brief commentaries

contextualizing each essay.Each the-

matic section is in turn organized

around a central question, a choice

that makes the relevance of the indi-

vidual themes immediately visible to

the reader. As the editors rightly

emphasize in fact, ‘[f]ollowing the

developmentof key ideas historically

allows readers to think about the

questions they raise and the context

in which theywere discussed’(at 4).

While each of these thematic areas

are interesting and would merit

specific discussion, for reasons of

space and because each theme

opens up a series of complexities

that cannot be addressed in a book

review, I will limit my discussion to

a few illustrative points, without

necessarily touching upon each of

the thematic sections.

The first thematic area, ‘popula-

tion’, addresses a key problem of

our contemporaneity, yet the

1

See, e.g., D. Tarlock, ‘The Nonequilibrium

Paradigm in Ecology and the Partial Unravel-

ing of Environmental Law’, 27:3 Loyola

University of Los Angeles Law Review

(1994), 1121; M. Tallacchini, ‘A Legal Frame-

work from Ecology’, 9:8 Biodiversity and Con-

servation (2000), 1085; R. Brooks, R. Jones

and R. Virginia, Law and Ecology: The Rise

of the Ecosystem Regime (Ashgate, 2002).

2

See, e.g., D. Wilkinson, ‘Using Environ-

mental Ethics to Create Ecological Lawʼ, in:

J. Holder and D. McGillivray (eds.), Locality

and Identity: Environmental Issues in Law

and Society (Ashgate, 1999), 19; M. Tallac-

chini, n. 1 above; and C. Cullinan, Wild Law:

A Manifesto for Earth Justice (Siber Ink,

2002).

3

E. Fisher, ‘Environmental Law as “Hot”

Law’, 25:3 Journal of Environmental Law

(2013), 347; see also V. De Lucia, ʻCompet-

ing Narratives and Complex Genealogies:

The Ecosystem Approach in International

Environmental Lawʼ, 27:1 Journal of Environ-

mental Law (2015), 91.

4

One example is the otherwise well-reflected

and innovative branch of legal philosophy,

Earth Jurisprudence. The concept of nature

however remains problematically under-

explored (as suggested by A. Schillmoller

and A. Pelizzon, ‘Mapping the Terrain of

Earth Jurisprudence: Landscape, Thresholds

and Horizons’, 3:1 Environmental and Earth

Law Journal (2013), 1) precisely at a time

when the category of ‘nature’ is in many ways

unravelling. Is the concept of nature merely a

deviceof the political epistemologyof modern-

ity, as Bruno Latour suggests? Is the future of

nature inevitably linked to the Anthropocene,

which in turn means that we can no longer

speak of nature, but only of a ‘post natural’

world (where there is no longer wild nature),

or only of ‘ecology without nature’? See

respectively, B. Latour, ‘An Attempt at a

“Compositionist Manifesto”’, 41:3 New Liter-

ary History (2010), 471; and T. Morton,

Ecology without Nature. Rethinking Environ-

mental Aesthetics (Harvard University Press,

2009).

5

See, e.g., M. Berman, All that is Solid Melts

into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Pen-

guin Books, 1988). This particular turn of

phrase was originally and famously coined in

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist

Manifesto.

6

This clearly emerges from key texts of the

international legal canon, such as the Stock-

holm Declaration on the Human Environ-

ment, found in: Report of the UN Conference

on the Human Environment (UN Doc. A/

CONF.48/14, 16 June 1972).

ª2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

270

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