CSS Lecture Series "After Sustainability" - Video SeriesRecording of lecture by Louis Kotzé onlineEnvironmental Law After Sustainability

15 November 2023, by CSS

We are very pleased to announce that the video of the lecture on "Environmental Law After Sustainability" for the CSS Lecture Series "After Sustainability" by Louise Kotzé (Research Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, North-West University, South Africa and Senior Professorial Fellow in Earth System Law at the University of Lincoln, UK) is now online!

You can watch the lecture here or directly below.

Abstract: In this lecture, Louis Kotzé talks about how humans, through our social regulatory institutions, consciously, but most often unconsciously, contribute to the deepening planetary crisis instead of addressing it. Many of these institutions, such as law, and specifically environmental law, have been created to protect nature. But through its cornerstone principle of sustainable development that environmental law fully embraces and promotes, law as an instrument to direct human behavior has become unable to keep humans within the limits of the planetary boundaries’ safe operating space. He will attempt to expose the principle of sustainable development for the predatory, neoliberal, capitalist principle that it is, and will show that the major paradigm shift we urgently require to confront the planetary crisis will ultimately depend on unconditionally rejecting this principle in favor or far more radical principles centered on notions of care, humility, and co-existence that collectively recognize and respond to the vulnerability of the entire Earth system. The talk concludes by briefly exploring the emerging notion of ‘Earth system law’, which offers a promising framework to reimagine a post-sustainability alternative for law in the Anthropocene.

You can find the flyer for the talk here [pdf].

You can find more up to date information on the lecture series here.