Human Bodies in Material Space: Lived Realities, Eco-Crisis and the Search for Transformation Editorial 4 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 2013

4 J. Hum. Rts. & Env't. 111 (2013)
Human Bodies in Material Space: Lived Realities, Eco-Crisis and the Search for Transformation

handle is hein.journals/jhre4 and id is 111 raw text is:

Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 4 No. 2, September 2013, pp. 111-115

Editorial

Human bodies in material space: lived realities, eco-crisis
and the search for transformation

This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment is dedicated to the
greatest struggle of our era - the ongoing - and increasingly urgent - struggle to con-
front the entrenched and growing violence (both epistemic and physical) of a global
order that is rapidly entrenching both human and environmental vulnerability. 'Business
as usual' is still obdurately committed to the political and juridical primacy of a funda-
mentally destructive capitalist ethic. What is needed - urgently now - is a fundamental
worldview shift - a shift inaugurating transformed understandings and practices capable
of unseating the dominant consumptive, pathological form of capitalism in the name of
a renewing transformation of our deepest sense of who 'we' are as earthlings amongst
other earthlings and earth systems.
In short, a literally life and death struggle is underway in our age for the very meaning
of the 'human' in a world which has been destructively subjugated by the violence of the
state-market complex for too long. This struggle is characterized, in significant part, by a
growing effort to give fuller ethico-juridical significance to the material situations of
countless human beings, non-human animals and living eco-systems placed in unprece-
dented danger by the irresponsible pursuit of profit and by its associated ecological
legacies. The evidence of this struggle is everywhere. It takes multiple forms: scholarly
engagements with vulnerability and with the radical, ambient insecurity of contempor-
ary existence (precarity); myriad critiques of law's exclusions; calls for animal rights;
rights-for-nature arguments; anti-capitalist strategies and agendas; movements to defend
indigenous cultures and life-worlds; the struggles of radical lawyers and of a wide range
of activist constituencies the world over to give content, meaning and force to what we
can think of as forms of eco-humane justice.
The task is immense, and the field of engagement challenging. As Weston and
Bollier point out in their contribution to this edition, the field is tilted firmly in favour
of the commercial and statist imperatives of the global political economy. Indeed, it
remains challenging to imagine any 'outside' to the hegemony of neo-liberal ecocidal
discourse, governance regimes, institutional structures and regulatory mechanisms.
Despite active critique on a number of fronts the values and structures of neo-liberal
hegemony continue to prevail and it remains the case that our national and interna-
tional legal orders are structurally committed to them and to assumptions and closures
that, if their trajectory continues uninterrupted, will ultimately threaten the existence
of the entire living order.
This edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment grapples with the
important task of considering how to create space for the materialities of human
embodied existence - in a lively world of beings and systems, scenes and contexts,
environments and ecosystems - to feature much more potently in our ethico-juridical
deliberations and structures. This edition therefore grapples with the need to find a

0 2013 The Author Journal compilation 0 2013 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd
The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK
and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.

Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

What Is HeinOnline?

Purchase Access

Contact Us

Log In

NEED HELP?

CONTACT US

Get started

Subscribe to our Newsletter