Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes-Amazon (PDF)

Extending law beyond the human, the book examines the conceptual openings, methodological challenges, and ethical conundrums of law in a time of socio-ecological transition.

How do we learn and practice law across epistemic and ontological difference? What sort of methodologies do we need? In what sense does conjuring other-than-human beings as sentient, cognitive and social agents-rather than mere recipients of state-sanctioned rights-transform what we mean by law and rights of nature in Latin America and beyond? Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in Latin America and beyond. In response, this book strives to integrate other-than-human beings within legal thinking, institutions, and decision-making protocols. Weaving together various fields of knowledge and worldmaking practices that include - but are not limited to - Indigenous legal traditions, ecological law, multispecies ethnography, and ecological economics, the book pursues a multi-sited ethnography that focuses on the entanglement of law, ecology, and Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Colombia. In so doing, it articulates a general post-anthropocentric legal theory which is proposed, a tool to address socio-ecological challenges such as climate change and bio-cultural loss.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of environmental law, Earth law and ecological law, legal theory and critical legal studies; as well as others working in the in the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, legal anthropology, and sustainability and climate change justice.