Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: The present work endeavours to show the full foundation of the realization of the new paradigm of Ecological Justice, beyond the new theories of Climate Justice and Environmental Justice, to protect nature and to face the current climate and environmental crisis in theAnthropocene Era. It is imperative to develop a theory of Ecological Justice, in order to legally protect nature by itself, based on the recognition of the value of ecosystems to be a legal entity subject to rights. In this respect, it is indispensable a new ethics capable of rooting justice and ecology: ecological ethics. Therefore, the new paradigm of ecological Justice provides Policy and Law with the environmental procedures and jurisdictional processes necessary to achieve more effective protection of nature as a subject of rights.Two cases will be studied where Law and Jurisprudence recognize nature as a subject of law. These are, respectively, the case of the Atrato River by the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Whanganui River by the New Zealand Parliament.To conclude, recognition this is the advance from human rights to the rights of nature, as the foundation of the proposal for an ecological Rule of Law for the 21st century, which implies the transition from the nineteenth-century model of the modern Rule of Law, and the traditional concept of citizenship, towards a new ecological citizenship, which includes not only social and ecological human rights, but also the rights of nature.
DOI: 10.17345/rcda2842
Author: Teresa Vicente Giménez
Institution: Universidad de Murcia
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3112692447