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Topic

A Green Legal Theory for the X-Cene: Diffracting Canadian Shelter, Reconciliation, and Anthropocene Discourses

Faculty of Law

Date & location

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Rebecca Johnson, Faculty of Law, ӣ��Ӱ�� (Supervisor)
• Dr. Sara Ramshaw, Faculty of Law, UVic (Member)
• Dr. Emile Fromet de Rosnay, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures, UVic (Outside Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. James Martel, Department of Political Science, San Francisco State University

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, UVic

Abstract

This dissertation joins with and extends Michael M’Gonigle’s Green Legal Theory (“GLT”), which insists upon deeper theoretical questioning, and which offers a fundamental relativization of the assumptions and practices we normally reinscribe around the signifier “law.” First, I engage with Canadian ‘right to shelter’ discourse, with a focus on shared assumptions that do crucial work but are sometimes unstated. I offer a ‘chrono-political’ framework to organize various claims made in the courtroom, in legal academic commentary, and by homeless people themselves. People sleeping outdoors have achieved noteworthy success in court, preventing immediate bodily peril. However, the ‘emergency’ temporality in those cases ultimately offers a limited politics. I evaluate proposals from legal academics who therefore prescribe court orders that aim to transcend emergency protection: the state ought proactively to provide some minimal level of shelter to everyone, thereby conjoining the emergency temporality with a longer term ‘progressive’ temporality. HI argue that these proposals insufficiently formulate how judges understand their institutional role and the extent to which courtroom doctrine can redirect wider neoliberal trends. Regulative assumptions about ‘gradual improvement’ in the law must themselves be interrogated. Second, I conduct a preliminary chronopolitical interrogation of the term ‘reconciliation,’ emphasising the temporal/historical presuppositions in this (anti-)political watchword. Disclosing both ‘emergency’ and ‘progress’ assumptions, ‘reconciliation’ can be read as an apologia for EP-flux in the domain of Indigenous government, one that is therefore an ideal node for critical redescription. To draw out the conceptual inquiry, I engage with the Ktunaxa case, exploring how the ‘reconciliation’ jurisprudence naturalises certain assumptions about law, land, progress, and sovereignty. I consider the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, demonstrating the astonishing extent to which the Report channels a particular neoliberal political rationality, saturated with the vacuous terminology that operates as a lingua franca in these nihilistic times. Third, I interrogate the notion of ‘a relation,’ beginning with Rodolphe Gasché’s deconstruction and moving toward a transcultural eco-poetics with the help of Edouard Glissant and others. Next, I critique the new epochal grand narrative of ‘the Anthropocene,’ which subtends the intersection between law and ecology. I survey ‘altercenes’ proposed in the literature to qualify, relativise, or displace it, such as the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene. I offer my own playful altercene, drawing on those that already exist: the X-Cene, connecting it with the ecological, postcolonial, and Indigenous threads that have preoccupied this dissertation. To evaluate the status of law specifically in the X-Cene, I turn to Michael M’Gonigle’s Green Legal Theory. He distinguishes between ‘legal law’ (familiar positivistic case law, legislation, etc.) and an unavowed but even more determinative ‘social law.’ It is only by transforming ecologically unsustainable social laws that the root dysfunctions of our time may be addressed.