Law in the Anthropocene? Maybe not

Eric Biber recently posted a series at Legal Planet based on his recent Georgetown Law Journal article, "Law in the Anthropocene Epoch" (abstract below). The Anthropocene, for those who have somehow missed this buzzword, is (according to its proponents--it has yet to be officially adopted) a new epoch, in which the signs of human changes to the planet are visible in the geologic record. The article and blog posts contain a useful catalog of ways in which current legal doctrines and institutions do a poor job of dealing with environmental challenges, and essentially argue for the desirability of major changes in liberal conceptions of individual rights and private property. That sounds right, but I'd like to quibble over three historical elements of the argument.

First, Biber's confidence in the direction of future political and legal change ("Humans will inevitably respond to the Anthropocene", "These responses will ineluctably lead to greater government involvement", etc.) seems to me problematic, reflecting an environmental-determinist and functionalist view of legal development that I find unconvincing. Many of the challenges identified by Biber have been with us for some time, and the law has apparently not adapted to them. It is not clear that it must or will do so in the future. I think a more tentative or even a normative tone would have made for a more convincing argument.

Second, Biber's use of "the Anthropocene" is idiosyncratic. Many proponents of the idea of an Anthropocene epoch seem to have settled on a start date in the mid-twentieth century, though others (including the originators of the idea) argue for an 1800 start, and others would push it back even further. In any case, if there is an Anthropocene, we are already in it, the challenges identified by Biber are already upon us (with many of them hundreds of years old), and so if, as he argues, the law will change in response to them, it should have already done so. If the Industrial Revolution took place during the Anthropocene, it is hard to make sense of his argument that "These changes will parallel similar revolutionary legal changes associated with industrialization and the development of a national economy in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."

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