Ecological Integrity in the Anthropocene: Lessons for Law from Ecological Restoration and Beyond

Abstract

Earth’s life systems face an expanding aggregation of anthropogenic impacts that by many measures has already overshot global ecological limits (Rockström et al. 2009; Carpenter and Bennett 2011; Berkhout 2014; Steffen et al. 2015). Humanity is caught between irreconcilable narratives of impossibility regarding the human prospect in the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch defined by human impacts (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2011). The currently dominant growth-insistent narrative says it is impossible to improve human and social welfare, and to protect the environment, unless the human economy grows indefinitely. The limits-insistent narrative says infinite economic growth inevitably leads to global ecological impacts catastrophic to present and future generations of human and other life, and that a downsizing and stabilization of the economy is urgently needed to reverse global ecological trends and restore degraded ecological functions. The Anthropocene prompts an urgent need to move towards a limits-insistent narrative that gives primacy to containing the human enterprise within ecological limits in a life-enhancing and mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship (Berry 1999)—whereby humans see themselves as members, not masters, of the entire community of life on Earth and interact with Earth and the life it supports respectfully and “for the benefit of the larger community as well as ourselves” (Berry 1999, p. 5).