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President’s Farewell Message: The Anthropocene, Earth Jurisprudence, and the Rights of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Hiroshi FUKURAI
Hiroshi FUKURAI*
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
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Abstract

A new paradigmatic shift in confronting the climactic endgame of the Anthropocene in Asia is in order. Scientific studies warned that Asia would become the epicentre of anthropogenic catastrophes and environmental disasters in the world. As the outgoing Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) president, I wish to contribute to critical discussions on two issues: (1) Earth Jurisprudence and (2) the Rights of Nature. These legal concepts must be critically examined, discussed, and developed by socio-legal researchers and policy-makers in order to avert the impending crises of the Anthropocene in Asia. This report examines the recent development of a robust movement toward Earth Jurisprudence in multiple countries of Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific—that is, countries that have recently enshrined the concept of the Rights of Nature into their legal system through transforming nature into rights-bearing entities in order to protect them from harmful human activities. Failing any significant remedial measures, many Asian cities, shores, and coastlines, including the archipelagos of multiple island states in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean may soon disappear due to the many decades of egregious human activities of industrialized countries and the corporate world. A robust system of Earth Jurisprudence must be established, in which the Rights of Nature must be imbedded in the centre of legislative and constitutional discussions and deliberations.

Keywords

AnthropoceneEarth Jurisprudencethe Rights of Natureclimate changeecological disasterAsia
Type
2019 Annual Conference of the Asian Law and Society Association
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 613 - 622
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society

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Footnotes

•

The author thanks Professors Kota Fukui and Yuka Kaneko who served as the organizers of the Fourth ALSA Conference in Osaka, Japan, 12–15 December 2019.

*

President of the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA, 2018-2019) and Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Correspondence to Hiroshi Fukurai, Professor of Sociology & Legal Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA. E-mail address: hfukurai@ucsc.edu.

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