11-12/06 Representation, nature and territory – Internal activities

The majority of the people who are promoting and participating in this workshop are part of the European project Speak for Nature: Interdisciplinary Approaches on Ecological Justice. This project, funded by the European Commission, aims to explore new strategies for building socio-ecological justice in the current situation of ecosocial collapse.

Goals:

This workshop has two objectives. The first is to share the philosophical and legal exploration, with a territorialized perspective, of the transformations that the relationship of our societies with nature has been undergoing, carried out so far in the conceptual phase of our project.

Building on the shift in perspective brought about by both ecological ethics and critiques of modernity’s mechanical view of nature, the law has been undergoing a period of profound transformation in recent decades. By overturning nature’s historical role as a mere object of legal inquiry, the new ecology of law has spent at least two decades innovating and implementing unprecedented legal strategies for the protection of nature—strategies that, in many cases, involve recognizing it as a subject of law.

The Speak4Nature project has sought to understand, firstly, the conceptual foundations of this transformation. What kind of philosophical conception of nature do these transformations require? What do they imply for our usual concepts of law? Secondly, it has conducted a comparative review of these new legal strategies for the protection of nature in both Latin America and Europe.

The second objective of this workshop is to collectively explore the potential of these new tools for nature conservation in the Basque Country. To this end, we have partnered with Iñaki Barcena, coordinator of the EKOPOL group at the University of the Basque Country, as co-organizer. Through his participation, and that of other experts and nature defenders from the Basque Country, we aim to achieve two sub-objectives. First, to explore the genealogy of the different nature conservation strategies that have been mobilized in the Basque Country, complementing them with a legal analysis that assesses the potential for implementing some of these new forms of protection within the Basque legal framework.

On the other hand, to evaluate together with different members of groups in defense of nature and environmental lawyers the potential of these tools for the different processes of conflict and defense of nature currently active in the Basque Country, thus simultaneously deepening both the legal tools and the theoretical-practical training of the organized civil society of the Basque Country.