Toward an Environmental Law of Essential Goods: A Philosophical and Legal Justification For 'Ecological Contract'

Abstract

Perhaps if the preservation of nature is to mean anything in the concrete legal and policy world in which we live, it is time to move away from our reliance on fundamentally changing grass-roots conventional moral values as a prerequisite to policy in a bottom-up approach to change. Instead, perhaps we should consider a revolution in the terms of the explicit legal contract between humanity and nature granting new essential status and fundamental legal standing to the natural world; redefining the core values and assumptions applied to policy from the top-down. The author will call this explicit ‘status' contract between humanity and nature the ‘Ecological Contract' and argue that it is only through legitimizing the status of nature in law that we can assure the long-term sustainability of the natural world.