Ecological Justice, Fear, and Art

Afshin Akhtar-Khavari, Griffith University Law School, has published Fear and Ecological (In)Justice in Edvard Munch's the Scream of Nature at 2 NAVEIÑ REET: Nordic Journal of Law and Social Research 130 (2015)(Special Issue on Law and Art).

We are accustomed to thinking about fear simply in terms of immediate or significant sensorial experiences – like coming face to face with a snake – but this has simply dulled our capacity to appreciate nuanced cognitive and temporal dimensions of emotional experiences of fear. In the Anthropocene epoch, the collective impact of our experiences and their impact on the ecology of planet Earth are important. However, instead of addressing the emotional reactions to being materially embedded, we often separate ourselves from this situation – both cognitively and emotionally. This article argues that our capacity to appreciate the kind of ecological justice that is needed in the Anthropocene epoch requires us to pay closer attention to our emotional experiences – particularly fear. In this context, Munch’s painting provides intrinsic symbolic support for and expression of the potential of fear to expose the reality of the impact of ecological injustice on human beings. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Art and Environmental Law

David Schorr, Tel Aviv University Buchmann Faculty of Law, is publishing Art and the History of Environmental Law in Critical Analysis of Law. Here is the abstract.

This article is an initial exploration of what the history of environmental law can learn from the arts. Looking at visual art (mainly paintings, with some drawings, prints, photographs, and poster art), supplemented by occasional glances in the direction of literary works, it asks what, if anything we can learn about the environmental law of the industrialized West of nineteenth and twentieth centuries before 1970, when environmental problems certainly abounded but before there was "environmental law". The focus is on pollution law, especially air pollution, with some attention paid also to land use law. The paper explores, first, how art may be read as reflecting the conditions against which environmental laws developed (or did not); next, indications in art of the effects of environmental law; and finally environmental law itself as depicted in art.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.