Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’

Abstract

In this paper, we begin reflecting on how ‘futures literacy’ – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored site and means of future-making. We consider our shared teaching of an undergraduate module in which students examine historical legislation for what it says about past ideas of the environment’s future and the action within the law necessary to safeguard it; and contemporary texts, including science fiction and poetry, imagining a future for the environment on and through which law operates. Futures literacy, we argue, is at its richest when ‘historical futures’ and ‘future futures’ are read together, or alongside one another.