Time and Environmental Law

Disciplined by industrial clock time, modern life distances people from natures biorhythms such as its ecological, evolutionary, and climatic processes. The law is complicit in numerous ways. It compresses time through fast-track legislation and accelerated resource exploitation. It suffers from temporal inertia, such as grandfathering existing activities that limits the laws responsiveness to changing circumstances. Insouciance about past ecological damage, and neglect of its restoration, are equally serious temporal flaws: we cannot live sustainably while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired. Applying international and interdisciplinary perspectives on these issues, Time and Environmental Law explores how to align law with the ecological timescape and enable humankind to tell natures time. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.