Nature positive? Commodification, speciesism, abjection in Australia’s environmental law reform

Abstract

Proposed “nature positive” revisions to the Australian Government’s environmental legislation would further entrench an anthropocentric conception of nature as a commodity able to be metricised, traded, and/or replaced. The proposed legislation also manifests a form of speciesism, focusing on threatened species at the expense of other animals whose habitat would continue to be destroyed, and fails to account for future likely changes in the survivability of various species. Moreover, it takes little account of the suffering of individual animals nor the agential role of animals, plants, rocks, and mountains in more-than-human world-making, thus placing those nonhumans in abjection—that is, accorded no moral considerability. Using the Australian case to anchor our discussion, we conclude that truly “nature positive” approaches to the environment require a shift in emphasis from principally enabling “sustainable” exploitation of resources by humans, toward a focus on sustaining the multitude of context-specific, intensely relational networks of humans-other-than-humans. These relations engender a responsibility on the part of humans, when intervening through legislation, policy or practice, to pay deep attention to the specifics of nonhuman standpoints, subjectivities and relations with place—ground truthing—so that greater knowledge and critical, less anthropocentric thinking can underpin more ethical regulatory frameworks.