Green Governance: Reimagining Our Stewardship of Nature
Professor Burns Weston and I recently published a series of six essays on CSRWire (CSR = “Corporate Social Responsibility”) that were derived from our book Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, published by Cambridge University Press in January 2013.
The book – an outgrowth of the Commons Law Project -- is a direct response to the mounting calls for a paradigm shift in the way humans relate to the natural environment. Green Governance opens the door to a new set of solutions by proposing new types of environmental protection based on broader notions of economics and human rights and on commons-based governance. At the heart of the book is a new architecture of environmental law and public policy that is theoretically innovative, but also quite practical.
The paperback edition was recently released, making it available to a much larger readership. To introduce the book to people who may have missed it the first time around, I am posting the original six CSRWire essays by Burns and me over the course of the next week. I hope you enjoy them! -- David
At least since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we have known about humankind’s squandering of nonrenewable resources, its careless disregard of precious life species, and its overall contamination and degradation of delicate ecosystems. Simply put, the State and Market, in pursuit of commercial development and profit, have failed to internalize the environmental and social costs of their pursuits. They have neglected to take measures to preserve or reproduce the preconditions of capitalist production – a crisis now symbolized by the deterioration of the planet’s atmosphere.
Despite the scope of the challenges facing us, there are credible pathways forward. In our recent book, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons, we propose a new template of effective and just environmental protection based on the new/old paradigm of the commons and an enlarged understanding of human rights. We call it “green governance.” It is based on a reconceptualization of the human right to a clean and healthy environment and the modern rediscovery of the age-old paradigm of the commons.
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