I've just returned from a very quick journey to New York where I was invited
to moderate this year the United Nations General Assembly dialogue on
harmony with nature. The harmony with nature program was established as a
result of, or pursuant to, the General Assembly Resolution of 2009 that
recognised the 22nd of April as International Mother Earth Day. Mother
Earth is the somewhat incorrect translation or approximate translation
of an Indian concept the Pacha Mama 'the Divine Feminine'. This is the direct
result of a lineage of thought and of legal philosophy that has seen Earth as
not a mere collection of resources, not as a mere collection of objects. Earth is
seen as the holistic integrated sum of all the ecosystems within which humans
exist and upon which humans depend. Then the well-being of the system is
paramount to the continuous well-being of all of its members. A little bit over
ten years ago I discovered the emergence of what was then called Earth
jurisprudence and is now called by a number of scholars ecological
jurisprudence to move beyond the planetary boundary contained in the term
Earth. So we can see that this idea of nature conceived as a subject of rights
has been emerging in a number of jurisdictions at a pace that makes
an ecological jurisprudence the fastest growing legal movement of the 21st
century. To conceive of nature as a subject is quite a challenging
proposition. Who speaks on behalf of nature? Who is capable of representing or
even imagining what nature's interests are if they are even conceived of as
interest? Southern Cross University, in particular the School of Law and Justice
has been pursuing the emergence of an ecological jurisprudence for well over a
decade. In fact many colleagues have written extensively or participated in a
number of symposia, conferences and so on and so forth on the theme. The School of
Law and Justice has recently identified over 60% of its
research outputs as broadly categorized as falling within an ecological
jurisprudence which makes us, although a very small law school,
we're the school with the highest concentration of academics actively
researching in the field at least in Australia, and likely one of the highest
in the world.