A presentation by Julia Dehm (La Trobe Law School). This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
Temporal concepts and terminology saturate ecological discourses, and thus those of environmental politics, environmental law and environmental human rights. These contain frequent invocations of the cyclical rhythms of nature, warnings that we are living through the ‘great acceleration’, demands for prevention, precaution and mitigation and the growing awareness that we have entered a new geological epoch, the ‘Anthropocene’. This presentation starts from the premise that such temporal rhythms are not an external background to the environmental crisis but rather that ‘the environmental crisis is also a crisis in the way we imagine time’ (Huebner, 2020). Moreover, because time is not neutral but rather an ‘immense but unstable tool of power’ the pursuit of environmental justice also requires the pursuit of temporal justice. Environmental human rights, therefore, perhaps more so than other human rights, have unavoidably had to engage with questions of time and temporality. Although environmental human rights have made important temporal innovations, this presentation suggests that environmental human rights remain unable to address the temporal dissonance that is an underlying cause of ecological harms, that they are limited in their ability to respond to the complex temporalities of how ecological harms unfold and finally that they produce a temporal ontology for themselves that is inadequate, and arguably counterproductive, for working toward ecologically just futures.
This presentation is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium's cluster on „Critical Engagements with Fundamental Rights”.
Julia Dehm is a Senior Lecturer in the La Trobe Law School. Her research addresses international and domestic climate change and environmental law, natural resource governance and questions of human rights, economic inequality and social justice. Her book Reconsidering REDD+: Authority, Power and Law in the Green Economy (Cambridge University Press, 2021) was awarded the early career research monograph award from the Australian and New Zealand Law and Society Association. She is also the Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
