Science and the Future of Environmental Law: a foray into the metaphysics of harm

A short film takes us to the rural Jura mountains in the 1960s. Through archival footage and one woman’s memories, we encounter a social-ecological world that developed over generations, and discover what disappeared as its culture, economy and landscape were simplified.

Could environmental law have protected this world? Before answering, we need to ask what law would have needed to recognise. Was it a collection of people, species, practices and properties, or a living system constituted through their relationships?

A documentary filmmaker and human rights lawyer joins a systems thinker and process philosopher to examine the hidden assumptions beneath environmental law. Ideas inherited from Western science and philosophy influence what law treats as an entity, where it locates agency, how it assigns responsibility and what it recognises as valuable or harmed. But these assumptions are not the only possibilities compatible with contemporary science.

Moving between film, conversation and collaborative thought experiments, we will explore alternatives drawn from complexity science and process philosophy. What changes if entities are understood as organised processes rather than fixed things? If agency is real but distributed across different scales? If value is found within the organisation of nature rather than supplied only by humans?

Participants will use these questions to imagine what legal systems built on different understandings of reality might allow us to recognise, protect and create.