Product Description

We are rapidly destroying our only habitat, Earth. It is becoming clear that many of the treaties, laws and policies concluded in recent years have failed to slow down, let alone halt or reverse, this process. This book attempts to shows that the survival of the community of life on Earth (including humans), requires us to alter fundamentally our understanding of the nature and purpose of law and governance, rather than merely changing laws. In describing what this new "Earth governance" and "Earth jurisprudence" might look like, it also gives practical guidance on how to begin moving towards it - fusing politics, legal theory, quantum physics and ancient wisdom into a fascinating story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79141 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

— Dr Vandana Shiva, President of the Research Foundation for Science,
"Wild Law is a stimulating, eminently readable response to our
governance crisis. "

About the Author
Cormac Cullinan is chief executive officer of EnAct International, an environmental law and policy consultancy headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa and a partner in the specialist environmental law firm Winstanley, Smith and Cullinan Inc. A former shipping and international commercial lawyer, he has specialised in the field of environmental law and policy since 1992.

Excerpted from Wild Law: Protecting Biological and Cultural Diversity by Cormac Cullinan. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Almost every day I notice signs that more and more people are longing for our species to cease its self-destructive war with Earth and with one another. Despite the hype around the brave new ‘globalised’ world that is supposed to bring all manner of blessings for our children, an unsettling stench is seeping out through the cracks in the information super-highway. Beneath the shiny surface of our super-, techno-, digitalised-, genetically engineered, globalised, wonder-societies, our planet and our humanity is decaying. Have you ever looked into the bright, clear eyes of a child and tried to explain why the whales are being killed and the forests burnt? Why playing naked in the sun is dangerous and some streams are poisonous? Why some frogs now have five legs and teenagers blow themselves up in the process of killing other children in the Middle East? Do you ever wonder why some of us work so furiously while others can’t find work and why either way, a deep satisfaction and a sense of belonging is so elusive?

This book doesn’t try to provide all the answers to these questions. However, it is an attempt to look one aspect of our 21st-century reality in the eye. The truth is that the dominant civilisations on the planet are behaving in a way that is leading our children and us into a bleak, unsustainable future that most of us do not want. It is a future that involves the casual destruction of ancient human cultures and biological communities, and the extinction of a shocking number of living beings that have co-evolved with us. Their passing involves not only the wanton destruction of millions of years of the Earth’s experience and wisdom recorded in genetic structures and the complex
webs of relationships within ecosystems; it also permanently diminishes the Earth Community and robs the survivors of the opportunity to co-evolve with them.

Customer Reviews

The most significant work on envirinmental law written to date
This is the wisest and clearest book written on environmental law I have read. It focuses on the root cause of environmental destruction and shows us that by becoming more earth centric within law (i.e. we are not at the centre of the universe but are part of a greater system that includes the earth) we can integrate human behaviour into the ecosystem and have a healthier planet and therefore a healthier humanity since we are part of the whole and not separate form the Earths environment.