Editorial: Technifications, appropriations, and environmental risk and damage: the search for responsibility

Abstract

Despite the differences between the articles published in this edition of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, the themes of appropriation, technical apparatuses (both material and discursive) and tensions concerning the uneven imposition of environmental damage and risk are either explicitly or implicitly present. The various articles share a sense – moreover – of how important it is to search for ways to construct responsibility for the imposition of such risk and damage. The Anthropocene climate crisis also presses unevenly into view: sometimes overtly addressed, at other times the inescapable background material situation against which all struggles for accountability and ‘responsibilisation’ (as Lorraine Code might put it) must now take place. The articles here, taken together, raise complex and important matters. In the collisions and convergences between the authors’ contributions, a whole continent of possibilities, critiques and lines of thought emerge. One identifiable narrative arc (there may be others) moves along a tangled track between the ‘ecologised appropriations’ of the Anthropocene (Pottage); the responsibilisation of eco-robotics (eco-robots are emergent forms, arguably, of techno-appropriation) (Donhauser); appropriative dynamics of Eurocentric legal and scientific epistemologies (Townsend); and the tensions between appropriative neoliberal economistic law and the constitutional human right to a clean and healthy environment in Kenya (Mwanza). The edition opens with Alain Pottage’s thought-provoking reflection on ‘Holocene jurisprudence’. Set against the geological identification of ‘the Anthropocene’, Pottage frames Carl Schmitt’s Nomos De Erde (Nomos of the Earth) as ‘the last flourish of Holocene jurisprudence’. Among the multiple themes emerging in Pottage’s article are the distinctively Anthropocene entanglements between geology and the social sciences; the non-naturalistic ‘general ecology’ marking the Anthropocene; the equivocal place of land as the originary site of appropriative claims, and Anthropocene transmutations of appropriation as a persistent, inherently political, dynamic. Appropriation, Pottage argues, for all available jurisprudences of Anthropocene responsibility, can no longer merely be read as appropriation of land in the traditional Lockean sense, for appropriation also takes place in multiple forms of spoliation (such as the pollutant ‘atmosphere-appropriations of the industrial powers’). In the Anthropocene, appropriation is now an ecologized process for which ‘ecology’ can no longer be just a designation placed over ‘nature’: the Anthropocene is marked by a ‘general ecology’ as the contingent effect of a diverse assemblage of ‘agencies, media, discourses and temporalities’. Pottage positions Schmitt’s ‘geojurisprudence’ as a