The title of this volume applies the increasingly popular concept of the Anthropocene1 to what have come to be known as environmental human rights (EHRs) (Knox et al., 2018; May, 2020; May & Daly, 2014, 2019). At its core, the Anthropocene reflects the idea that the human and non-human elements of the earth system have become so completely intertwined that no change can occur in one without impact on the other (Young et al., 2017). This new state of affairs imposes upon us a responsibility our species has never faced – that of determining both own our fate and the fate of all living things, and the role that law plays in the mix of environmental law and governance (Kotzé, 2017). However, with great responsibility sometimes comes great opportunity. If every environmental challenge is now also a human challenge, it may be that human interests and the interests of the non-human (or, more-than-human) environment are gradually converging (Baber & Bartlett, 2015). If so, then the protection of human rights may afford new opportunities to protect the environment (and vice versa). It remains to be seen whether we are astute enough to recognise those opportunities and take advantage of them.

As the chapters of this book recount, the last few decades have witnessed increasing communion between the fields of environmental law and human rights. Traditionally, the field of environmental law serves to achieve desired ecological conditions, such as clean air, water, and land and is captured by more than 500 international agreements, many of the world’s constitutions, and in countless laws and regulations and local ordinances around the world. Human rights, on the other hand, serve to advance desired human conditions, including civil rights such as voting and socioeconomic rights such as health or education, again through a combination of international, regional, and municipal legal pproaches. Yet what work can the legal order do to address the Anthropocene?

The direct and coherent effort to secure environmental human rights is a relatively new feature of the international scene. If an official birthday were needed, the appointment of Professor John Knox as the United Nations’ first Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment in 2012 would serve. However, a persuasive argument could be made that the environmental human rights (EHR) movement can trace its lineage back at least to the environmental justice movement (EJ) of the late 1970s (Bullard, 1994). Some might date the movement even earlier or find its precursors elsewhere in the world. I shall not pursue those points here, because my purpose in invoking the environmental justice movement lies not in genealogy but rather comparative anatomy.

The essentially open-textured quality of political discourse that an equivocal (equi-vocal) norm suggests does not simply allow for many voices to be heard – it mandates it. Likewise, governance benefits from the pragmatism inherent in a norm that eschews absolutes and formulaic solutions in favor of bespoke designs, tailormade for environmental problems that vary in character by location and time. The forces of globalization make legislative oversight of administrative action difficult, if not impossible, by multiplying accountability challenges across multiple governance levels and processes. Using existing administrative competencies, a deliberative model of transnational democratic accountability can build on the functions that intergovernmental organizations already perform tolerably well without relying on new legislative inputs or continuous monitoring by elected officials. Two features of democratic deliberation – its tendency to reduce moral disputes and to promote consensus – can reduce the costs of organization maintenance in stakeholder communities that offer non-legislative alternatives for administrative oversight. The EU is a pioneer of transnational democratic oversight and administrative accountability, and its incremental and trial and error innovations, as inadequate as they still are, offer lessons for the problem of accountability in the absence of effective legislative authority.

Over the course of a little more than a decade, an unusually coherent and comprehensive literature has emerged on the demands of effective earth system governance. Informed by the insight that humanity is no longer (and can no longer be) a spectator with respect to global environmental change, the concept of earth system governance recognizes that human actions have had an impact on our planet that has driven, and is driving, its primary ecological systems beyond the range of their natural variability. As a result, humans face a challenge like no other – the necessity to actively and self-consciously govern the environment that sustains us.

In the Anthropocene, earth system governance must be effective both within and across identities, and the inescapable equivocality of democratic governance means that discussions can never be closed but merely transformed as old problems and concerns give way to new. The experimental quality that effective environmental governance must possess cannot be a transient quality but, rather, must be a permanent feature of the landscape of democratic decision-making, in which success is realized in a context of identity politics. To take place without distortion and without posing systemic disadvantage, and for intergroup differences to be accommodated, substantial equality of access to decision-making and equitable allocation of fundamental capabilities are essential prerequisites. Institutional arrangements must provide for empowerment of those whose identities are otherwise ill-favored and the embeddedness of environmental decision-making in the communities of fate where people actually determine their shared life experiences.

More than just democracy in the form of aggregation of votes, deliberative democratic practice makes possible the learning, local knowledge, and engagement required by enlightened environmental governance under the conditions associated with the concept of the Anthropocene.

In the context of earth system governance today, experimentation is no longer merely a virtue but a basic survival skill. Administrative professionals – understood to include administrators national, international, and subnational, both governmental and nongovernmental, across the entire range of policy arenas – are in a position to engage in this best practice for learning from experience, perhaps to a greater degree than any other agents of governance. Protected by both their relative anonymity and their institutional affiliations, they enjoy the dual benefits of relative invisibility and administrative discretion. Administrative professionals can experiment with social and political arrangements that are not only adaptive but are also democratic and effective in reconciling humans to their environment. The volatility of their environments has meant that they face devolved responsibility in governance for both acquiring resources and achieving results. Administrative professionals succeed by being scavengers par excellence, such that approaches that work well anywhere are destined eventually to be tried everywhere.