The Legal Perspective of Ecosystems in Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice by Cormac Cullinan

Wild Law: A manifesto for Earth Justice is a book by Cormac Cullinan that proposes recognizing the natural order of communities and ecosystem from a legal prospective. He attempts to show an integration of different fields of study like world politics, Environmental legal theory, physics and how teachings from the ancient world can create an appealing notion for the need for change in today’s environmental understanding. This book has been influential in informing and inspiring the global movement to recognise rights for “Mother Nature”. This movement Cormac Cullinan preaches is destined to shape the 21st century as significantly as the human rights movements shaped the previous century.

Cullinan argues in his book, Wild Law of the impending fact that our species is rapidly destroying our only habitably place to live planet Earth. He indicates that our current governance systems are extremely dysfunctional and need to be completely reengineered. Furthermore, the many environmental treaties, laws and policies adopted in recent years have, by large, failed to slow down, or let alone halt or reverse, the destruction of the planet. This he maintains, is because the legal systems of the present government systems and the policies and institutions associated with them, are based on a mechanistic and dualistic understanding of the world, and on various myths, all of which we now know to be false. Myths such as the belief that human society is separate from, and ultimately superior to the natural world, are now 'hard-wired' into most legal and political systems. Consequently, the overall effect of these governance systems is to facilitate and legitimise the ongoing degradation of our planet.

Cullinan explains the complicated process of ...

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...elentless industrial development and destruction of resources, but through the living forces that brought us into being and are the only forces that can sustain us in the coming centuries'. Wild Law is a significant and inspiring development in to the exploring how we might develop such laws and institutions in the future to not only serve us, but the entire ecosystem.

Wild Law shows us how a quality that can only be experienced by straying off this predictable path of civilization as we currently understand it and as we know, it has to be found, obviously must be found it the wilderness, those special places where wildness rules. However, we would do well to remember that in many cultures the wilderness is also strongly associated with wisdom. It is the place to which people go in times of transition or confusion, and it is the place from which new insights emerge.