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Sand, Inger-Johanne --- "Environmental law in the age of the Anthropocene: how to normatively communicate on environmental change and risks" [2017] ELECD 1457; in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas; Brooks, Victoria (eds), "Research Methods in Environmental Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 396

Book Title: Research Methods in Environmental Law

Editor(s): Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas; Brooks, Victoria

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784712563

Section: Chapter 16

Section Title: Environmental law in the age of the Anthropocene: how to normatively communicate on environmental change and risks

Author(s): Sand, Inger-Johanne

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

Environmental law has been developed cross-disciplinarily in close contact with empirical natural sciences on the state of the environment. With the increasingly more intensive and comprehensive interventions of human beings on the environment, defining environmental damage and hazards empirically as well as politically and normatively has become not only increasingly complex and controversial, but also crucial. How we assess empirical data, and how we conceptualize the values and the risks involved is decisive. Empirical and legal dogmatic methods are currently insufficient in terms of grasping the complexity of communicating environmental hazards. Communication and semantic theory is consequently suggested as a methodological approach in order to critically analyse more precisely the present state of environmental law, and how it could develop in order to convey the complexities of environment hazards in a legal language. It is suggested in the chapter that the planet has entered the age of the Anthropocene and, with that, an immensely complex environmental situation requiring new concepts and standards of environmental law. Sustainability and precaution have been tried out as reflexive legal concepts, but often losing conflictual situations to the more binary concepts of economic law. Applying the insights of theories of communicative differentiation is suggested in order to analyse more specifically what types of semantics and concepts are required to normatively express the current situation of environmental hazards and risks.