Climate Law & Governance Lecture Series: Time and Environmental Law in a Changing Climate

To showcase the growing hub of climate law and governance research and expertise within The Dickson Poon School of Law, we are delighted to host a three-part series of public lectures on climate change and governance during 2017. These lectures will be given by distinguished experts in the field of climate change law and governance internationally, as well as our own King’s talent in this field. These lectures will present emerging thinking in climate law and governance globally and will harness and reflect the interdisciplinary research and teaching interests relating to climate change within the School.

The inaugural lecture of our new series Climate Law and Governance will launch Prof Ben Richardson's forthcoming book Time and Environmental Law. We also welcome Mr Cormac Cullinan as discussant for this presentation”.

Time is fundamental to human affairs. The upheavals of the Anthropocene including climate change reflect growing discrepancies between human and natural time scales. Disciplined by industrial clock time, modern life distances people from nature’s biorhythms such as its ecological, evolutionary, and climatic processes. The law is complicit in myriad ways. It compresses time through fast-track legislation and unsustainable time frames of resource exploitation and impacts including carbon emissions. The law suffers from temporal inertia, such as ‘grandfathering’ existing activities that limits the law’s responsiveness to changing circumstances. Insouciance about past ecological damage, and neglect of its restoration, are equally serious temporal flaws: we cannot aspire to live sustainably and tackle global warming while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired. Applying international perspectives of these issues, this lecture explores how to align law with the ecological ‘timescape’ and enable humankind to ‘tell nature’s time’. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.

Based in Tasmania, one of the world’s most fascinating places in the recent history of legal and political struggles over the natural environment, Benjamin J. Richardson is a Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Tasmania, as well, in 2017, the Global Law Visiting Chair at Tilburg University. Earlier, he held the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Law & Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and before then academic positions at the law faculties of York University (Canada), the University of Manchester and the University of Auckland. Professor Richardson has researched diverse subjects including Indigenous peoples and the law, ethical investing, and corporate social responsibility, and environmental philosophy. His global recognition includes winning the Research Excellence Prize of the UN Principles for Responsible Investment Academic Network and the Senior Scholar Prize of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law. Professor Richardson is a member of the Australian Panel of Experts in Environmental Law and practises environmental stewardship on his Tasmanian eco-sanctuary, Blue Mountain View.

Cormac Cullinan is director of the leading South African environmental law firm Cullinan & Associates Inc, as well as CEO of the environmental governance consultancy EnAct International, a former anti-apartheid activist, and a King’s College London LLM alumnus. His practice includes designing the “architecture” of public and private sector governance systems that promote sustainability, drafting contracts and legal instruments (ranging from international treaties and declarations to national, provincial and municipal legislation), litigating, advising businesses and social entrepreneurs on greening their enterprises, and developing legal compliance systems. In the academic field Mr Cormac has lectured and written widely on governance issues related to law and the environment including the ground-breaking Wild Law, and several works for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. His work in pioneering a legal philosophy that restores an ecological perspective to governance systems (Earth jurisprudence) is internationally recognised.

Climate Law & Governance: Public Lectures