Green Governance:
Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons
The vast majority of the world’s scientists agree: We have reached a point in history where we are in grave danger of destroying Earth’s life-sustaining capacity. But our attempts to protect natural ecosystems are increasingly ineffective because our very conception of the problem is limited; we treat "the environment” as its own separate realm, taking for granted prevailing but outmoded conceptions of economics, national sovereignty, and international law.
Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013, is a direct response to the mounting calls for a paradigm shift in the way humans relate to the natural environment. It opens the door to a new set of solutions by proposing a compelling new synthesis of environmental protection based on broader notions of economics and human rights and on commons-based governance. Going beyond speculative abstractions, the book proposes a new architecture of environmental law and public policy that is as practical as it is theoretically sound.
Meanwhile, a 2011 essay about these same themes―from which Green Governance is derived―can be read below. “Regenerating the Human Right to a Clean and Healthy Environment in the Commons Renaissance” is a 229-page draft essay that can be downloaded as pdf files by individual sections or in two parts. The entire essay and associated documents are all available for copying and sharing under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Read more on Commons Law Project
or download a PDF of the essay here