Environmental Law and Ecological Crisis: Perspectives on Decolonial EcologyThis article analyzes environmental law based on the provocations of Latin American political ecology to identify the limits of the dominant reading of this legal field to understand and confront the contemporary ecological/climate crisis. The research uses the essay form and through literature review aims to offer other conceptual readings for legal thought to understand and better confront this crisis. To this end, it unfolds environmental law into two faces, ‘hidden/permissive’ and ‘repressive’ which serve as a support point for the impasses of environmental law facing the extractivist model, in confronting anti-environmentalist attacks. It concludes that the absence of reflection by legal thought about the mechanisms of expropriation resulting from the extractivist model and the reliance on solutions based on negotiation logic contributes to maintaining and worsening the ecological/climate crisis, therefore being insufficient to rethink the society-nature relationship and ensure socio-environmental justice.
Keywords:
Environmental law; climate crisis; decolonial political ecology; disaster law; socio-environmental justice