Suchergebnisse

The structure of the mechanisms in the Kyoto Protocol with respect to "carbon sinks," may be integrated so as to place incentives on national governments that counter recent progress made towards the preservation of old-growth forests. A focus on the element carbon fails to recognize values other than sequestration that standing forests can provide. For example, an approach that strictly seeks to increase the rate of fixation of atmospheric carbon will favour replacing old-growth forests with monocultural plantations of trees. The international community, in implementing these mechanisms, may frustrate other environmental initiatives such as the conservation of endangered species habitat and the protection of biodiversity. Further, focusing on the rate of sequestration is misguided. The recent empirical evidence suggests that the best way to use forests for climate change mitigation is to allow them to grow old, and to protect them from ever being logged. It has been observed that the inability of the international community to reach agreement on implementation of the Kyoto Protocol at a series of international meetings held recently in The Hague turned on technical issues surrounding "carbon sinks." This article deciphers the issues to reveal what interests are at stake in this debate, and how forests came to be the crutch that supports the 'old economy' and prevents our planet's progress towards a sustainable economy and a stable climate.

Residents of pollution hotspots often take on projects in 'citizen science', or popularepidemiology, in an effort to marshal the data that can prove their experience of the pollution to the relevant authorities. Sometimes these tactics, such as pollution logs or bucket brigades, take advantage of residents' spatially ordered and finely honed experiential and sensory knowledge of the places they inhabit. But putting that knowledge into conversation with law requires them to mobilize a new, 'foreign' set of tools, primarily oriented to the observation, measurement and sampling of pollution according to conventional scientific standards. Here, I employ qualitative empirical methods in two case studies of communities 'downwind' of Canada's contested tar sands region to demonstrate that the knowledge that is crucial to these citizen science strategies is not only local, situated and experiential in origin but also collectively generated and held. I draw on the notion of transcorporeality, emanating from feminist theory of the body, to demonstrate that the knowledge offered to law through these efforts often represents a fluid merger of experiential and conventional ways of knowing, posing a productive challenge to the strictly positive notions of science and evidence dominant in legal proceedings.

Reconsidering Knowledge: Feminism and the Academy, by Meg Luxton and Mary Jane Mossman

This Article offers a critique of tort remedies grounded in feminist theory of the body. It demonstrates how tort law is invested in a notion of an individuated legal subject, which fails to capture the critical interconnectedness of bodies in a social, political, historical, and colonial context. Taking the "injury" of endocrine disruption in a Canadian Aboriginal community as an example of a contemporary pollution harm, the analysis considers various torts on a conceptual level, and what they might offer the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in the way of remedies. In each case, what the tort can do depends on how the injury, and the scale at which the entity taken to have suffered the injury, is conceived.

This paper explores how law might conceive of the injury or harm of endocrine disruption as it applies to an aboriginal community experiencing chronic chemical pollution. The effect of the pollution in this case is not only gendered, but gendering: it seems to be causing the 'production' of two girl babies for every boy born on the reserve. This presents an opening to interrogate how law is implicated in the constitution of not just gender but sex. The analysis takes an embodied turn, attempting to validate the real and material consequences of synthetic chemicals acting on bodies — but uncovers that finding a harm in a declining sex ratio depends on a static conception of the human form, based on unfounded assumptions of 'naturalness' and 'normalcy'. Elizabeth Grosz's theory of 'becoming' offers a compelling challenge, essentially pointing to the conclusion that we should find harm where we find illness and suffering and not simply where we find difference. At the same time, we cannot discount the political economy of the pollution: the paper concludes by returning the focus to the role of power, colonialism and the state in the perpetuation of the pollution on the landscape.

The central aim of this article is to demonstrate a socio-legal approach to risk and precaution using the example of chronic pollution. Drawing on ongoing empirical work with the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, which is tucked into Sarnia's "Chemical Valley," a secondary aim is to influence and shape how we understand the problem and confront the risks of chronic pollution. This article forwards the argument that the prevailing regulatory approach is incapable of capturing the essence of contemporary pollution harms, because those harms are increasingly linked to continuous, routine, low-dose exposures to contaminants that are within legally sanctioned limits. Community residents and advocates struggling against chronic pollution are increasingly identifying with the environmental justice movement and adopting its strategies of resistance, including its mantra of "precaution." These strategies of resistance have the potential to dramatically expose the impotence of the prevailing regulatory approach to chronic pollution.

RésuméCette étude examine le rôle d'une doctrine juridique émergente, le principe de précaution, dans l'élaboration du plan de gestion du virus du Nil occidental dans la ville de Toronto, en 2003. Elle soulève la question si le principe de précaution, duquel on s'attend généralement à ce qu'il transforme la prise de décision en matière d'environnement et de santé publique, peut servir de feuille de route ou de guide aux agents responsables au travers les incertitudes associées tant au virus qu'au 'traitement'. Bien que la recherche se concentre sur un contexte local particulier, elle aborde également des défis plus vastes posés aux gouvernements qui espèrent pouvoir s'appuyer sur le principe de précaution pour guider leurs politiques face à la controverse. Dans le cas du virus du Nil occidental, les responsables de santé publique semblaient se trouver devant un problème insoluble: opter pour la précaution face au virus, une menace incertaine à la santé publique, signifiait s'exposer à des risques pour l'environnement et la santé associés à l'utilisation de pesticides chimiques. La recherche s'appuie sur des données empiriques qualitatives recueillies par observation participante lors de séances du conseil municipal de Toronto et par entrevues semi-structurées avec près d'une douzaine des principaux acteurs politiques. L'objet de cette analyse empirique détaillée est d'évaluer le potentiel du principe de précaution comme instrument politique à la lumière de l'argument couramment invoqué par les détracteurs du principe. Peut-il nous sortir de la controverse? Ou bien, est-ce que le principe de précaution, comme le soutiennent certains chercheurs en droit, notamment Cass Sunstein, «ne mène nulle part»?