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EcoLaw
Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature
Margaret Davies
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EcoLaw
Legality, Life, and the Normativity of Nature
Margaret Davies
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About This Book
This book re-imagines law as ecolaw.
The key insight of ecological thinking, that everything is connected to everything else â at least on the earth, and possibly in the cosmos â has become a truism of contemporary theory. Taking this insight as a starting point for understanding law involves suspending theoretical certainties and boundaries. It involves suspending theory itself as a conceptual project and practicing it as an embodied and material project. Although an ecological imagining of law can be metaphorical, and can be highly imaginative and suggestive, this book shows that it is also literal. Law is part of the material 'everything' that is connected to everything else. This means that once the previous certainties of legal thinking have been dismantled, it is after all possible to think of law as 'natural' â as embedded in and emergent from a normative biophysical nature. The book proposes that there exists a natural nomos: animals, plants, and Earth systems that produce their own values and norms from which human norms and laws emerge. This book, then, proposes a new way to understand law, and pursues specific arguments to demonstrate the feasibility of law as ecolaw.
Drawing inspiration from current trends in the post-humanities, socioecological thought, and developments across the natural sciences in their specific intersections with humanities and social science disciplines, this book will appeal both to legal theorists and to others with interests in these areas.
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1 A New Living Law
DOI: 10.4324/9781003128335-2
Introduction
Consider the slime moulds.1 They are both microscopic and macroscopic organisms, neither plant, animal, nor fungi, that are known to have around a thousand different species. Slime moulds are notable for their variable aesthetics, their amazing shape-shifting abilities, their ecological functions, their mobility, their biophysical properties, and their many social capabilities. To look at, slime moulds come in several forms.2 Some visible slime moulds are relatively flat plasmas without individual cells but multiple nuclei that stretch like irregular webs or crackle patterns across surfaces such as logs. Others with a similar acellular structure form irregular lumps, such as the aptly named âdog vomitâ or âscrambled eggâ slime. Others are microscopic single cells but under certain environmental conditions (lack of food, mainly) they form visible superorganisms.3 The most beautiful of these make a little trunk consisting of thousands of sacrificed individual organisms at the end of which sits a polyp of dormant spores waiting to burst out when conditions are more favourable. Slime moulds can be a single colour, or multicoloured, and many are iridescent.
1See generally Lloyd 2018.
2A large number of images can be found in Lloyd 2018 and also online.
3A âsuperorganismâ is a collective of interdependent organisms that form a whole, such as an ant colony, a beehive, the human body, or â in some accounts â Gaia. (On why Gaia cannot be described as an organism, see Latour and Lenton 2019.)
Slime moulds have generated a significant quantity of academic literature in many science disciplines, not only the disciplines of biology but also cognitive science, information science, bionic engineering, evolutionary theory, materials science, immunology, ecology, cybernetics, and others. But they have also become interesting for systems and network theory, as well as a medium for artists, musicians, and a general inspiration for curious thinkers. This interest is a consequence of the remarkable properties of slime moulds. They exhibit collective and social behaviour, even though they are acellular or single-celled organisms. They can radically change shape to look like webs or slugs and can move across different terrains. They can learn, sense, remember, and make decisions,4 for instance to find the fastest route through a maze, even though they do not have neurons. Their cognition and behaviour are organized distributively rather than concentrated in a central cell or group of cells. One mould species has the properties of a âmemristorâ or a material that remembers the pathway of an electrical current.5 Slime moulds can process information and form optimal networks between a complex set of points. These and other properties give them many applications in computing and artificial intelligence.6 In early 2020, an algorithm based on a slime mould growth pattern was used to map with a high degree of accuracy the connections between galaxies.7
4Reid et al 2012; Beekman and Latty 2015. The use of terms like âlearningâ may be controversial for forms of so-called primitive cognition that are not neuron-based. See generally Moskovitch 2018. However, in appreciation of its problem-solving abilities, one US college has appointed a slime mould faculty member: Resnick 2018.
5Braund et al 2016.
6See generally Adamatsky 2016.
7Burchett et al 2020.
Despite their many practical applications and remarkable capabilities, as organisms slime moulds seem a long way from humans and an even further distance from human law. But they are in many ways instructive;8 they challenge the human- and higher-animal-centred images that pervade cultural ideas about cognition, individual identity, and social behaviour; they provide information about the evolutionary connections between amoeba and humans; they have worked themselves into human culture and theory; speaking broadly, their patterns and modes of being may have much in common with human life.
8Fox Keller 2007b.
So what can we say about the connection of slime mould with law? How do law and slime mould interact? Legal theory suggests several possibilities, drawn from the expanding jurisprudence on animals, insects, micro-organisms, and plants.9 Looking at the question from a conventional legal point of view, even in the absence of a category of âslime mould lawâ, there is obviously much in law that might reference the slime mould: what law allows humans to do and not do, for instance in changing land uses that affect slime mould ecosystems; or the various regulatory mechanisms that banish unwanted organisms from human-occupied spaces such as hospitals, hotels, houses, and schools. Can slime mould be used for human purposes and appropriated in the form of some product or patentable invention?10 From this straightforwardly legal perspective, the slime mould would be a target of legal regulation â probably excluded from lawâs direct notice rather than specifically named, but nonetheless a passive recipient of legal action, appropriation, exclusion, protection, or nonaction. Like much of the nonhuman sphere, it is an object affected by the norms of human subjects. Extending this slightly, slime mould (and other parts of Earthâs ecosystems) inhabits human meaning and therefore can be regarded as potentially part of the wider human nomos, or normative world.11
9Many imaginative and critical approaches regarding animals are presented in Otomo and Mussawir 2013, eg Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2013. On plants, see eg Roncancio 2017.
10Cf Limon 2013.
11Cover 1983.
The change of orientation required by ecological thinking inspires a second set of law-slime mould connections, that is, concerning the material entanglements of humans and all of their institutions with the nonhuman world. Meanings emerge from the material world and humans also emerge as beings from this world. Everything human belongs to material ecologies; as first and foremost physical beings we are entirely reliant on our habitat and environment, all of it, including the slime. Thinking ecologically requires a repositioning, a flattening, of the subject and object: no longer in charge, no longer unique, no longer essentially individual, the human circulates in distributed ecological networks in which we are always becoming rather than being. We are ontologically object as much as subject, although we assume the position of subject and reify it through social forms and legal institutions.12 In itself, slime mould, or any other organism (or collective-individual superorganism), might be understood as an assemblage of intra-actions that are also networked into other socio-ecological assemblages, in which human meanings and materialities also participate.13 Ecologically motivated legal theory has so far had little impact on the modalities through which state law operates in practice,14 though some legal effects are to be seen wherever the human is placed by law in a relational context or where the environment is promoted as an end in itself.
12See eg Marwani 2019 (on insects as âbiopolitical agentsâ).
13Cf Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2015; Arup 2021.
14But see important theoretical contributions a...