Orderings of 'law' and 'nature'

One of the most confounding theoretical questions in legal discussions about climate change is what role law should play in reconfiguring humanity’s relationship with Nature. One intuitively compelling solution that has been proposed, even at high-level fora like the UNGA, is that humans should live in closer harmony with Nature. However, neither ‘harmony’ nor ‘Nature’ as concepts offer much clarity about what role law can or should play in this. Many legal scholars writing on the Anthropocene accept as fact that humanity’s troubling disharmony with Nature stems from an anthropological moment when human societies distinguished ‘Culture’ from ‘Nature’ and thereafter used their species-specific laws to objectify and exploit Nature. Such thinking presumes that law can and should mitigate or overcome this divide either by erasing it by providing legal subjecthood to non-human natural entities, or by reorienting law around norms identified in Nature or natural processes. However, this runs against the findings of natural scientists whose research is increasingly revealing how human law is not the only species-specific form of ordering on the planet. The fact that all species order themselves in unique ways suggests that there is nothing unnatural, in how law distinguishes humans from other living and non-living things. As far as is now known the only feature of law that seems unique is how humans use ‘norms’ as the mechanism to achieve their social orderings. This paper will engage with these findings by proposing that it is possible to consider law’s (dis)harmony with Nature by understanding the relationship in terms of law’s interactions with the plural ordering systems that constitute ‘Nature’. By redefining human law as a normative system interacting with a plurality of other natural ordering systems, this paper will sketch out a new normative framework for better conceiving what it would mean for law to exist in ‘harmony’ with Nature.