An Introduction to Green Governance

Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons

Commons scholar David Bollier and law school professor Burns H. Weston persuasively argue that protecting the commons depends upon “bold modifications of our legal structures and political culture.” This article, first published in the current issue of Kosmos Journal, is drawn from their forthcoming book Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights, and the Law of the Commons to be published by Cambridge University Press next year. Bollier and Weston are founders of the Commons Law Project, which envisions “a new architecture of law and public policy that can effectively address climate change and other urgent ecological problems while advancing human rights and social empowerment.” — Jay Walljasper

At least since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, we have known about humankind’s squandering of nonrenewable resources, its careless disregard of precious life species, and its overall contamination and degradation of delicate ecosystems. In recent decades, these defilements have assumed a systemic dimension. Lately we have come to realize the shocking extent to which our atmospheric emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens Planet Earth.

If the human species is going to overcome the many interconnected ecological catastrophes now confronting us, this moment in history requires that we entertain some bold modifications of our legal structures and political culture. We must find the means to introduce new ideas for effective and just environmental protection—locally, nationally, regionally, globally and points in between. More