Antigone in the Anthropocene: From Neoliberalism to a New Conservation Ethic

The global environmental outlook is increasingly bleak and the human condition does not fare better. The IUCN Red List of endangered species is longer than ever, with predictions foretelling the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs.[1] Human development reports reflect growth but do not measure well-being, deep inequality or apathy.[2] A hundred years ago, North America was coming out of a war fought overseas and entering an era of fossil fuel electrified industrialization. It was claimed that economic \u27progress\u27 would inspire efficient use of resources, but rather what it transpired was reckless waste of natural capital and an epoch of environmental crises, the Anthropocene, defined by overwhelming anthropogenically induced environmental change.[3] Narratives on peak oil, disasters, resource wars, and water and food insecurity challenge all paradigms, including law and legal systems. The Anthropocene has been derived in part through the mechanization of exploitation and commodification of Nature through a regulatory structure known as \u27law.\u27 Positive laws have been crafted to protect Nature but struggle against economic forces and there is no rule as to when Nature or Neoliberalism wins, except as determined by political whim.[4] Part of weathering the Anthropocene must involve the mechanism most systematically used for governing human behavior, the law, and in so doing, it should look to that theory of law which is most concerned with promoting justice and good human behavior, the natural law. In other words, natural law is the ideal toward which positive laws should converge. However, there have been naturalist scholars throughout the Enlightenment and Industrial eras who have seen human domination of Nature as a universal mandate. As the Anthropocene indicates, those self-serving interpretations are errant.[5] [1] International Union for the Conservation of Nature [IUCN], The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (2011), http://www.iucnredlist.org/.; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 (2010). [2] United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], Human Development Report 2010 (2010).; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs [UNDESA], The Millennium Development Goals: Report 2010 (2010).; New Economics Foundation, The UnHappy Planet Index 2.0: Why Good Loves Don\u27t Have to Cost the Earth (2009). [3] Jan Zalasiewicz et al., Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?, 18 GSA Today 4-8 (2008). [4] Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: Governing People for Earth (2002). [5] Robyn Eckersley, Environmentalism and Political Theory: Toward an Ecocentric Approach (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992) at 25