Metanarratives of International Environmental Law and Science in the Anthropocene Era: The Ontological and Epistemological Incompatibility

• Author: Douglas de Castro
• Position: Professor of International Law in Ambra University (Florida, U.S.)
• Pages: 124-139

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Metanarratives of International Environmental Law and

Science in the Anthropocene Era: The Ontological and

Epistemological Incompatibility

Douglas de Castro1

Abstract: Transboundary environmental phenomena are considered challenges to

states in the international system, especially considering those that pose existential

threats to humankind. The Eurocentric ontology and epistemology of International

Environmental Law lead to exclusionary stances due to the totalizing propositions in

metanarratives, in which tradition and other worldviews are not part of the modernist

project that ultimately will lead human beings to happiness thru reason and development.

As such, this article presents the case in favor of the Transnational Environmental Law

as an alternative to the shortcomings of International Environmental Law and Local Law

in regulating the transboundary issues, which in nature are regional. The hypothesis in

this paper is tested in the biodiversity case, in which the research technique applies the

critical analysis of discourses as developed by Norman Fairclough 2013.

Keywords: International Environmental Law; Biodiversity; Metanarratives;

Transnational Environmental Law; Critical Analysis of Discourses

1. Introduction

The regime of International Environmental Law (hereinafter referred to as IEL) is

illegitimate.2 This premise is assumed by observing the birth of IEL as a mutation of

the traditional international law to deal with the raising concerns with transboundary

environmental issues.3

Although IEL developed new legal concepts to regulate transboundary

environmental phenomena, such as soft law, and umbrella treaties, and its proximity

with natural sciences, it remains a stance of the Eurocentric international legal system,

thus, coping with the failure of the modernity’s project of endless happiness thru reason

and development.

1 Douglas de Castro, Ph.D., Professor of International Law in Ambra University (Florida, U.S.). E-mail:

douggcastro@gmail.com. The author sincere thanks to Professor Liyan Yang (SWUPL, China) for the

helpful comments made on the earlier version of this paper.

2 This is a paraphrase of the quotation “The regime of International Law is illegitimate” in proceedings

of the Annual Meeting. See Makau Mutua & Antony Anghie, What Is TWAIL?, 94 American Society of

International Law 31, 40 (2000).

3 International lawyers tend to agree that the historical markers of the IEL are the United Nations

Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972) and the United Nations Conference on

Environment and Development (Rio, 1992).

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In this sense, metanarratives or totalizing mega-discourses sustain the international

legal order, providing the basis for action/judgment in all situations, disregarding

stances in both the social and natural worlds.4 Citation style is not right, please fix also,

the existing metanarratives in international law are performative utterances, which are

part of discourses directed to specific actions and purposes, which in this case, the

universality narrative presents the argument of the inexistence of temporal or physical

constraints in the social construction of meanings in the world, thus, the exclusion of

alternative worldviews is legally justified.5 The same applies to the narrative presenting

science as the superior form of acquiring knowledge, which excludes traditional or

indigenous knowledge.

Therefore, the so-called new legal concepts that emerge with IEL are part of an

updating process of the metanarratives of international law to survive in the passage

from the Holocene to the Anthropocene paradigm, in which “[…] humans are now a

major geological and environmental force, as important as, or more important than,

natural forces.”6 Within this new paradigm, nature cannot be a mere object in which

human beings observe to understand and dominate within the boundaries of the social,

but their experiences in developing and sustaining order in the natural world produce

existential threats (Vidas et al. 2015;7 Thomas 1996;8 Foster 19999).10

The increasing natural extreme events happening all over the world are becoming

sources of great concern among humankind, which “[…] in recent years there has been

a growing concern over thresholds or tipping points in nature”.11 Unfortunately, the

same concern cannot be observed in the international political arena, which lately has

striven to address the environmental challenges (Bernardin, Chiuso, and Lesage 2015;12

Gonzalez 2017;13 Alam et al. 2016).14

4 See Lyotard & Jean-Francois et al., Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of

Minnesota Press, p.4 (1984).

5 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Martino Fine Books, pp.10-2 (2018).

6 See Richard T Corlett, The Anthropocene Concept in Ecology and Conservation, Trends in Ecology

& Evolution, 30(1) ScienceDirect 36, 36 (2015).

7 See Davor Vidas & Ole Kristian Fauchald et al., International Law for the Anthropocene? Shifting

Perspectives in Regulation of the Oceans, Environment and Genetic Resources, 9 Anthropocene 1, 13

(2015).

8 See Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, Oxford

University Press, p.15 (1996).

9 See John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable P lanet: A Short Economic History of the Environment,

Monthly Review Press, p.22 (1999).

10 Chakrabarty suggests that the concept of Anthropocene has been introduced for the first time by

the Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky in the book The Biosphere but gained traction in 2000

with Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer published in the newsletter of the GeosphereBiosphere

Programme, http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/anthropocene.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680009238.html

(accessed on November 4, 2020).

11 See Lester R Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, W.W. Norton & Company, p.1

(2009).

12 See Pascal Bernardin & Diogo Chiuso et al., O Império Ecológico, 1a. Vide, pp.3-4 (2015).

13 See Carmen G. Gonzalez, Global Justice in the Anthropocene, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract

=2929042 (accessed on June 1, 2021).

14 See Shawkat Alam & Sumudu Atapattu et al., International Environmental Law and the Global

South, Cambridge University Press, p.142 (2016).