Facing mass extinction, it is prudent to decolonise lands & laws: a philosophical essay on respecting jurisdiction

ABSTRACT The drivers of mass extinction today are societal processes (including economic and legal systems) inherited from European imperialism and embedded in the international state system. Their path dependencies demand that we engage in decolonial work. This work centrally involves countering land abstraction – the rendering instrumental of lands, waters, and skies for the sake of national territory, capitalist profit, or industrial resource use. Much Indigenous law is centred on moral relations with lands, internalising ‘ecological reflexivity’ within Indigenous society in highly articulated ways not present in the social memory of nation states. Prudential reasons thus support decolonising Indigenous lands, making room for the sovereignty and jurisdiction of Indigenous law. Such reasons are not exclusive but rather add to already evident reasons of justice in support of Indigenous decolonisation which have for some time been urgent calls for concern. This paper provides new reasoning for decolonisation concerning the practical relations between the disestablishment of our inherited colonial order and the curtailment of now alarming rates of extinction threatening the current order of life on this Earth.