The Environment Has No Standing in Environmental Governance

Abstract

For most of human history the natural environment stood separate from man: indifferent and alien, to be overcome, exploited, or managed. This article draws on the legal concept of standing and the nonlegal concept of voice to argue that nature no longer has standing as an “other” within the global environmental governance framework. Reviews of the transition toward “sustainable development” in environmentalism and also the post–Cold War global environmental governance framework are offered to support this point. Freed of the role that nature plays to ground humanity in space, sustainability now frames mankind only in temporal terms that are developmental but, without reference to context, irrational. The implications that nature has no standing are applied as alternative perspective on Blühdorn’s arguments for a “politics of unsustainability.”