Week 9: Ecological Jurisprudence - A fancy word for a real problem
History, Arts, and Linguistics
28th Jun 2025
2
This week I am asking you to think about the structures that exist to speak for and protect future human-nonhuman generations. Please read this ABC news article: Environment Minister approves Vickery coal mine extension after teenagers' climate change legal challenge
and watch the interviews with the young students who took the Minister for the Environment to court. They were asking the Minister to be responsible for their future health and well-being - this was rejected by the Minister and ultimately the Full Federal Court rejected the case.
Watch: The Law and Sustainability (34:01 min) transcript downloaded
Watch: Environment case - Minister for the Environment v Sharma (33:55 min) transcript downloaded
Please watch the interview with Professor Jay Sanderson on this recent decision by the Federal Court on the Sharma vs Minister for the Environment.
I think it's important to swing back to the beginnings of the course and the origins of sustainability. We saw that Kuhlman and Farrington (2010) our first reading talks about sustainability being coined in forestry, "where it means never harvesting more than what the forest yields in new growth" (p. 3437). And I am now asking you to jump to this most recent reading by Pelizzon (2020), who raises the interesting question by Professor Stone, in his Law lectures - "Should trees have standing?" (p. 35). This moves beyond thinking about trees as a functional part (object) of our economic system and something that can be managed for our outcomes, towards thinking about trees as having value in themselves. Should we consider trees and what they want? This moves us from our place of human exceptionalism and introduces the powerful idea that maybe it is not just us that matters? Please read Pelizzon as she does an amazing job of describing this very different way of thinking.
Watch: How trees talk to each other (18:25 min)
Be prepared to have your ideas about trees challenged - by a Forester: Suzanne Simard
This is the last topic that you will investigate as you prepare your Task 2 reflection. This topic is difficult but also critically important to spend some time thinking about. It also introduces the idea of law potentially supporting change or at a minimum speaking for endangered habitats, environmental systems and other non-human beings on our planet.