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Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne --- "Introduction: thought, law, rights and action in an age of environmental crisis – in search of better future histories" [2015] ELECD 853; in Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne (eds), "Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 1

Book Title: Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis

Editor(s): Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784711320

Section Title: Introduction: thought, law, rights and action in an age of environmental crisis – in search of better future histories

Author(s): Grear, Anna; Grant, Evadne

Number of pages: 22

Extract:

Introduction: thought, law, rights and
action in an age of environmental crisis ­
in search of better future histories*
Anna Grear and Evadne Grant

The original GNHRE Oñati International Workshop 2012 ­ by which this
edited collection is inspired, from which it draws and to which it adds ­
was set up in full knowledge that the relationship between `human rights'
and `the environment' (both as constructed (legal) domains) remains both
complex and fractious.
At the institutional level these two domains (even taken as unproblem-
atic referents to commonly understood concerns) still have an uneasy
connection notwithstanding increasing evidence of their interconnections,
while at the philosophical level it has often been asserted that the
individualism of human rights makes them inherently ill-suited, as a
moral and juridical category, to address the inherently more collective ­
and less `anthropocentric' ­ concerns of environmentalism.
Human rights and environmental law are also unevenly theorised.
Human rights scholarship is richly reflexive, manifesting an intense,
sustained and energetic degree of contestation and theoretical disputation.
It is multi-faceted and multi-perspectival: its traditional accounts and


* This edited collection was inspired by a series of articles resulting from a
workshop, `Human Rights and the Environment: In Search of a New Relation-
ship', held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, Spain,
14­15 June 2012 and coordinated by Anna Grear (Cardiff University). The
editors of this collection would like to thank Karen Morrow, Louis Kotze and
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos for their comments on an earlier ...