The Constitution Of The Environmental Emergency

This book argues for a reframing of environmental law. It starts from the premise that all environmental issues confront lawmakers as emergencies. Environmental issues pose a fundamental challenge to law because it is impossible to reliably predict which issues contain the possibility of an emergency and what to do in response to such an unforeseen event. These features undermine the conventional understanding of the rule of law. This book argues that approaching environmental issues from the emergency perspective leads us to an understanding of the rule of law that requires public justification. This requirement recentres the debates in environmental law around the question of why governance under the rule of law is something worth having in the environmental context. It elaborates what the rule of law requires of decision-makers in light of our ever-present vulnerability to catastrophic environmental harm. Controversial, compelling and above all timely, this book presents an important new perspective on environmental law.

This article argues that environmental issues confront us as an ongoing emergency. The epistemic features of serious environmental issues - the fact that we cannot reliably distinguish ex ante between benign policy choices and choices that may lead to environmental catastrophe - are the same features of an emergency. This means that, like emergencies, environmental issues pose a fundamental challenge for the rule of law: they reveal the necessity of unconstrained executive discretion. Discretion is widely lamented as a fundamental flaw in Canadian environmental law, which undermines both environmental protection and the rule of law itself. Through the conceptual framework of the environmental emergency, this article offers a critique of the current understanding of discretion in environmental law and suggests how an alternative conception of the rule of law can both constitute and constrain the state's regulative authority over the environment.

This book addresses the ways in which the Black Summer megafires influenced the development of climate narratives throughout 2020. It analyses the global pandemic, and its ensuing restrictions, as a countervailing force in the production of such narratives. Lives and properties were lost in the spring and summer of 2019 and 2020, when catastrophic bushfires burnt through millions of hectares of mainland Australia. Nearly 3 billion native animals died. And for millions of Australians, and others worldwide, it was through the Australian megafires that the global climate emergency became tangible and concrete, no longer a comfortably deferred, albeit problematic abstraction which could be consigned to future generations to deal with. This book explores the legal and other implications of new understandings of climate emergency arising from the fires, and the emergence of a hierarchy of emergencies as the pandemic came to dominate global and domestic political discourses. It examines narratives of culpability, and legal avenues for seeking retribution from government and big fossil fuel emitters. It also considers the impact of the fires on the burgeoning phenomenon of climate activism, particularly in Australia, and the ways in which pandemic restrictions curtailed such activism. Finally, the book reflects on the fires through the lenses offered by climate fiction, and apocalyptic fiction more generally, in order to consider how these shape, and might shape, our responses to them. This important and timely book will appeal to environmental lawyers and socio-legal theorists; as well as other scholars and activists with interests in climate change and its impact. It is recommended for anyone concerned about current and future climate disasters, and the shortcomings in legal, political and popular responses to the climate crisis.

Permanent States of Emergency and the Rule of Law explores the impact that oxymoronic 'permanent' states of emergency have on the validity and effectiveness of constitutional norms and, ultimately, constituent power. It challenges the idea that many constitutional orders are facing permanent states of emergency due to the 'objective nature' of threats facing modern states today, arguing instead that the nature of a threat depends upon the subjective assessment of the decision-maker. In light of this, it further argues that robust judicial scrutiny and review of these decisions is required to ensure that the temporariness of the emergency is a legal question and that the validity of constitutional norms is not undermined by their perpetual suspension. It does this by way of a narrower conception of the rule of law than standard accounts in favour of judicial review of emergency powers in the literature, which tend to be based on the normative value of human rights. In so doing it seeks to refute the fundamental constitutional challenge posed by Carl Schmitt: that all state power cannot be constrained by law.

Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 101 provides guidelines on developing emergency operations plans (EOP). It promotes a common understanding of the fundamentals of risk-informed planning and decision making to help planners examine a hazard or threat and produce integrated, coordinated, and synchronized plans. The goal of CPG 101 is to make the planning process routine across all phases of emergency management and for all homeland security mission areas. This Guide helps planners at all levels of government in their efforts to develop and maintain viable all-hazards, all-threats EOPs. Accomplished properly, planning provides a methodical way to engage the whole community in thinking through the life cycle of a potential crisis, determining required capabilities, and establishing a framework for roles and responsibilities. It shapes how a community envisions and shares a desired outcome, selects effective ways to achieve it, and communicates expected results. Each jurisdiction's plans must reflect what that community will do to address its specific risks with the unique resources it has or can obtain.