Context Of Environmental Crisis Research Articles

A Provocation to Practice Utopianism in the Face of Climate Crisis

This short piece explores the radical potential of utopia to imagine alternative futures from within the context of environmental crisis. It presents utopia as an ecological practice that offers the potential to reimagine the relationship between humanity and nature as we face up to climate crisis. It challenges ecocritics and other scholars to produce academic output that is both environmentally-minded and utopian, that is to say alive to the innumerable possibilities of other ways of being.

Eco-terrorists Facing Armageddon: The Defence of Necessity and Legal Normativity in the Context of Environmental Crisis

The invocation of necessity as a defence for acts of civil disobedience has raised questions about the rule of law and legal certainty. The rise of radical environmental activism in the context of climate change warrants an inquiry into the scope and limitations of the defence in Canada. This paper argues that the defence of necessity significantly increases legal flexibility in Canadian environmental law. To some extent, the defence may thus enhance the law’s resilience to socio-ecological changes. However, the defence could also render the law flexible to such an extent that positive norms might lose their prescriptive value in certain circumstances. In particular, as the link connecting human activity, climate change, and consequent damage to the environment becomes clearer, there is a greater likelihood of environmental activists successfully invoking necessity to defend illegal acts aimed at curbing environmental degradation. In other words, necessity may offer a defence against the enforcement of legal frameworks de facto authorizing catastrophic environmental destruction. The prescriptive value of those legal frameworks could be critically diminished, and the resilience of the law as a normative framework may be threatened.