Time and Environmental Law
Telling Nature's Time

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 numerous ways. It compresses time through 'fast-track' legislation and accelerated resource exploitation. It 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 live sustainably while Earth remains degraded and unrepaired. Applying international and interdisciplinary perspectives on these issues, Time and Environmental Law explores how to align law with the ecological 'timescape' and enable humankind to 'tell nature's time'. Lending insight into environmental behaviour and impacts, this book pioneers a new understanding of environmental law for all societies, and makes recommendations for its reform. Minding nature, not the clock, requires regenerating Earth, adapting to its changes, and living more slowly.

1. It's time; 2. Temporalities of change; 3. The ever-present now; 4. Rear vision; 5. Rallentare; 6. Telling the time.

Benjamin J. Richardson is a Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Tasmania, and the 2017 Global Law Visiting Chair at Universiteit van Tilburg, The Netherlands. Previously, he held the Canada Research Chair in Environmental Law and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 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 on Environmental Law and practises environmental stewardship on his Tasmanian eco-sanctuary, Blue Mountain View.