From Ecological Description to Political Prescription. Some Challenges among Theories for Environmental Change

Abstract

After briefly reviewing the evolution of the link between philosophy and the natural sciences, the article, with no aspiration to be comprehensive, analyses a small sample of the many philosophical proposals generated to respond to the need to change the relationship between humanity and planet Earth. Vis à vis the rhetoric of the environmental “crisis”, the three theories here chosen – Ecological Integrity, Earth Jurisprudence and the Ecology of Law – propose changes in the relationship between politics and law and the natural sciences. They suggest the use of the natural sciences as an unquestioned guide not simply to ground political and legal decisions – i.e. inspiring science-based decision-making – but rather to provide apparently unpolitical responses to current environmental challenges, concealing normative and value-based decisions under a veil of scientific neutrality. Using Chakrabarty’s distinction between the global and the planetary dimensions, the article describes the three theories and proposes some overarching critiques of their common approach towards the sciencepolitics relationship.