Law at the End of the World
In this podcast, coming to you from the end of the world, Elizabeth Macpherson and Cristy Clark share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and those who depend on it - i.e. everyone.
Law at the End of the World
The Politics of Despair and Hope in the Ecocene - Episode 20 (with Mihnea Tănăsescu)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, Mihnea Tănăsescu joins us to discuss his groundbreaking research on Ecocene Politics. Mihnea reflects on how we can conceptualise human relationships with nature, with particular attention to learning from place-based restoration projects and Indigenous legal systems. We critically explore how hope, despair, and lucidity can help or hinder our attempts to make sense of the ecological challenges communities are facing around the world. We also discuss the ways that legal and political theory scholars can draw on and connect to other academic disciplines, like ecology, and use fieldwork to ground their thinking in lived experiences and place.
As always, Cristy and Liz round off with their updates about environmental law developments, including further developments in Aotearoa's climate tort saga and the status of Aborignal cultural heritage reform and climate litigation in Australia.
Profile of Mihnea Tanasescu (UMONS)
Researching river personhood: Making the case for relational research methods
Law and the Environment: An Act of Legal Kintsugi?
Australian position on fossil fuels and renewables
Western Australia and Aboriginal heritage
Inequality lab global justice project
Complaint laid with Ombudsman about 'apparent withholding' of information by PM's office
Committee recommends disestablishing Environment Ministry despite public opposition
Would you like to leave us a comment about our show? send us a note here
Visit our podcast website - where you can find more information, including the show notes.
You can also find us on the following platforms:
MIME is not necessarily a critique by invoking the term ecosystem, but it's saying, well, if humans are collectively, however problematic that may be causing a lot of environmental changes, that doesn't mean that they're in the driving seat. That doesn't mean that they're also guiding the process. A lot of it is extremely ignorant, right? And sort of haphazard and patchy. The other part of this equation is the ecology itself, it's how the world is changing. And a lot of times it's those changes that actually drive political and social change. It's the carbon cycle that could be considered to be more in the driving seat than humans. So the term ecosyn is supposed to elicit that inverse, right? That reversal, that saying, what if we consider this not the age of humans, but the age when humans become aware again of the incredible power of the natural world to outmaneuver and force our hand into certain kinds of changes, for better or worse?
SPEAKER_00Hi, and welcome to Lore at the End of the World, where we talk about the future of environmental law. I'm Elizabeth McPherson. I'm a pakya, professor of law and a Ravens and Discovery Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. University of Canterbury is located in the South Island of Al Peru, in the Tuwa of Maitahu.
SPEAKER_04And I'm Christy Clark, an associate professor of law at Monash University, which is located on Boonarang Country in Australia. I'm joining you today from Roger Wurang Country. In this podcast, coming to you from the end of the world, we share developments and insights about how law is being used to support outcomes for the environment and the people who depend on it. Hello, Liz. What have you been up to?
SPEAKER_00I'm good. It's actually been super, super dry in Altiador. I think we've had the driest May on record, I believe. But today it's incredibly wet. So we've suddenly had a whole bunch of rain all at once. I have been doing lately quite a lot of reviewing. So I feel like I've been spending a lot of my time reviewing other people's grant applications. I'm part of a really large evaluation program for a European research program. And so I've been reading a lot of other people's plans for research projects and evaluating those, which has been interesting in order to see the sorts of projects that other people are pulling together. These are transdisciplinary projects. So it's really interesting to see the teams that people are putting together and the questions that they're trying to address. I've also been reviewing other people's promotion applications and getting to write some references for people, which I really enjoy doing, especially because some people are doing some of that for me at the moment too. So it's really nice to be able to pay it forward. You don't often get to rip return the favour of the people who have written lots of references or, you know, evaluated applications for you, but you get to do it for the next generation of researchers. So I love doing that. And I've been peer-reviewing a few articles and books as well, which is also, you know, hard work, it's time-consuming work, but it is an important act of service. And I think we all appreciate getting our own work critiqued as well as being able to critique the work of others. And even if that process is robust, it's an important part of being an academic. We had an incredible amount of engagement on our last Law at the End of the World episode. And it was really cool to see how much that episode about the rights of nature with our colleague and friend Erin O'Donnell really resonated with people. But since then, too, we've also released Christy U and Hayden Tudua, our article on researching river personhood and making a case for relational research methods, which is another companion piece for the chapter that we spoke about in the last episode that's been released on SSRN. And this was published on the More Than Human Life Ideas Hub that's been published by NYU Law. So we'll link to that in the show notes. I've also been doing some expert witness work, um, continuing on with that, and hopefully I'll um have an opportunity to speak a bit more about that later on. Maybe not today, but maybe another day. And yeah, that's been pretty much what I've been filling my days up with at the moment. How about you, Christy? What have you been doing?
SPEAKER_04Well, I'm still settling in, um, five weeks, I think, into uh the job, maybe six. That's gone by quickly. It's gone by quickly, and I felt I said to someone the other day that I feel like I have been there for like two seconds and a year because it's gone really fast, but it's also there's been a lot going on. It's been very, very lovely to uh get to know my colleagues a lot better. And it's a very big faculty, so that's been really varied and diverse, but also really busy. And also in second semester, I'll be teaching international environmental law and the law and climate change. And so these are new units for me to take on, and they're both huge topics that you could do a master's on either of those topics. Um and so by necessity, I have to be really selective in what I include, and given the timing coming after the International Court of Justice climate advisory opinion, there's a real need to make sure that the content is up to date. So I've been doing a lot of work to try to think through what to include and how to sort of shape those units. Um I'm also really conscious of the risk that these units could be really depressing, they could be full of bad news. We we can't avoid studying really what amount to a lot of failures in the area, failures of action and implementation, failures on governments to agree on the best course of action going forward. And these have all led to our current moment. But I kind of want to hold open a space for possibility. You know, the future is always uncertain, and climate change has really intensified that uncertainty. Um, but this also implies possibility. So I'm trying to work out how to include that sense of possibility within the context of being really clear-eyed about the critique. Um, and so I want the students to think through both the limits and the potential of law and even maybe how we push some of those limits. So, what are we going to focus on today, Lee?
SPEAKER_00Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what's going on in the world and try not to feel too weighed down by it. I mean, we've got multiple wars going on, we've got the pressures and the risks to human communities posed by climate change. We're seeing in many countries around the world more intolerance, more xenophobia and more racism, for example, in our politics. And then we've also got the exponential growth of artificial intelligence and what that might mean for the future of the university and what that might mean for the future of legal practice. So it's kind of hard not to feel a bit disillusioned at the moment about the sort of work that we're doing in the spaces that we're working in. And I mentioned this to you, Christy, just before we got on the call today, but maybe five years ago, probably around about five years ago, I feel like you'd go to a lot of conferences and the themes might be, you know, apocalypse and the end of the world and it's the poly crisis and all these sorts of things, the triple planetary crisis. And it's the pendulum's kind of swung the other way now. I think maybe coming out of COVID, and people feel like they need new reason to feel motivated to make change and to engage communities. So as we've mentioned on the podcast before, utopia and hope are having a big moment. A lot of people are using these as themes to pull people together to talk about environmental law as part of conferences. They're also popping up a lot in the titles of journal articles and books that I'm seeing be published. And I know that you've done some work around utopia as methods. So we're also seeing some methodological discussions and some discussions about hope and utopia in teaching. I think I've been quite late to the game. And I often, given the sort of work that I do, tend to the pessimistic end of the spectrum rather than the optimistic sometimes. But I'm really glad that there are people who are doing the theoretical work in terms of, you know, what what changes can we really make in the world? Because we have to be working towards something positive, or else if we're just focusing on the negative, we've got nowhere to go. So I think in particular that in teaching, this is probably quite important too, because I'm sure for young people it's quite disillusioning to only be told that, you know, everything's going wrong in the world and there's nothing that we can do to stop it. But today's episode, we're going to focus on how we make sense of this political moment that we're in, and we're going to touch on with our guest both the role of hope and despair. Excellent. I'm looking forward to it. So we're very lucky this week to have Mechnea Tanasescu joining us for this episode. Mechnea is a research professor in the School of Human and Social Sciences at the University of Mons, which is in Belgium. And he's also the president of the Society for Human Ecology. Mechnea is known globally for his groundbreaking work on the politics of nature, environmental ethics, the political representation of non-humans, restoration ethics, rewilding, and environmental policy. He's the author of Understanding the Rights of Nature, a Critical Introduction, and also Eco-Seeing Politics. And he's written too many journal articles for me to mention here on these topics. Mekneh's scholarship has examined some of the world's most emblematic legal innovations, including the constitutional rights of nature in Ecuador and legal personhood for rivers in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Through his work, he's challenged conventional assumptions about rights and relationality, especially when applied to non-human entities or beings. So in this episode of Law at the End of the World, Mihnia joins us to explore what it might mean to imagine law and politics beyond the Anthropocene and how new forms of ecological thinking could reshape our collective futures in the eco-cene.
SPEAKER_01Hi Liz, thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00It's so great to have you here. I haven't seen you for quite a few years now, and I'm just trying to remember when we met, but I think it was probably in about 2018 when you came out to Altiarua. But it's really great to have you come and talk to us about your research today. I was hoping that I could start our conversation by asking you about how you ended up in academia in the first place and how you ended up doing this sort of work, engaging with ecosystems and the environment and and I suppose also with indigenous rights issues. So what inspired you to do this sort of work and was it always your plan?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thanks a lot for again for the invitation and for that question. I think last time we saw each other was indeed in 2018. I attended a workshop that that you organized, and we've been in touch ever since, but we haven't really had the chance to talk talk. So this is that's great. Yeah, I think every sort of path also happens by chance. Like that's the first way that comes to mind when you ask that question is it sort of happened by chance. I think there were decisive moments along the way. The first one early on, I was lucky enough to meet some people that sort of became role models and showed me that it's possible to make a life from sort of intellectual work, which was uh really inspirational. And then I tried to to sort of follow in their in their footsteps. Now, of course, you need a lot of of luck for that to happen. It wasn't necessarily my plan to be an academic, but it was one of the only ways that I could make that desire and that passion happen. So that's why I ended up choosing this uh this particular career. In terms of environmental sciences and more generally um ecology, the environment, I think the interest is from very early on. I it's it's very sort of banal. I always liked sort of playing with animals and being out in nature and and discovering things, even though I I was born in uh in a city that would bring you know stray dogs home type of thing. But then academically it started being important to me after I I did studies in philosophy, where I was very interested in phenomenology, existentialism, uh sort of issues of of self and perception. And that got really straight after a while, and I sort of got tired of just looking inwards and rediscovered this this love of the surroundings and it it felt like an expansion to me. Uh it felt like looking at environmental issues is a way to to not be closed in inside yourself, but to really be really interested in how things connect and how the how the world works. So that that's sort of how I ended up doing this. I was also lucky to have some training in uh notably in human ecology and to do sort of a very interdisciplinary path uh that also allowed me enough sort of expertise to look at different things together.
SPEAKER_00I've got a question for you later on about interdisciplinarity, so we'll go into that a bit more. Um, but where did you grow up, Meknia? Like where where was your childhood? Because you've lived around a few different places, haven't you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's right. So I I grew up in Bucharest in the capital of Romania in the 80s and 90s. So you can you can calculate my age now. And I I moved to Italy when I was 16. And looking back on that now, it feels like I was I was a kid, but it really didn't feel like it then. It felt like I was ready to take on the world. Uh I moved to Italy for the last two years of high school at this international school, part of a m movement called the United World College. So I went to this United World College of the Adriatic in in northern Italy with students from all over the world, and it was a school dedicated to building um sort of peace and international understanding through education. So it was a very, very strong experience for me. After that, I lived in the US for the next seven years. On first I went to uh liberal arts college called College of the Atlantic, where I studied human ecology, and then I studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. And at the time the European Union in Europe was expanding and Romania became a member in 2007. And right about then I had to sort of make a choice, am I gonna stay in the in the US or or not? And I felt really inspired by this expansion of the European Union, so I moved back uh to Belgium for very sort of contingent reasons, where I started a PhD in political science, and then stayed and and have worked in Belgian academia since.
SPEAKER_00And you spent some time in Ecuador during your doctoral studies as well, is that right?
SPEAKER_01Yes, I did, because I wrote my my thesis on the constitutional rights of nature in Ecuador, so I spent some time there as part of the research. And then generally, I mean throughout my research, I've I've really uh cared a lot and still do about doing fieldwork, even though a lot of my work is theory, but I don't actually see a contradiction there at all. I I actually see a very symbiotic relationship. So I've done field work in in different places, but the the first one was equivalent.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, most of our listeners will be really familiar with your book, Understanding the Rights of Nature, A Critical Introduction, which is a really fantastic book. It's it's kind of my touchstone when I have to go back and look at issues of political theory and legal theory related to rights of nature. It's just such an amazing contribution to the whole community, I think, in terms of really thinking hard about some of the concepts that rights of nature throw up. But you also have another fantastic book, which is probably maybe less kind of globally famous because probably the topic of the rights of nature is so kind of evocative for people around the world. Um, but your other book is called Eco-Scene Politics. So can you tell us what exactly the ecocene is? Where did this idea come from and why do we need it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, thank thanks for uh the appreciation. It's very kind. Indeed, I think the the rights of nature is sort of easier for you to travel because it's its moment uh somehow. And but the the eco-cene politics is closer to my heart in many ways, and it's much more a work that is partly scholarly somehow, and partly comes out of uh a way of seeing the world that I'm trying to put on on the pages. So the ecocene is one of the thousands of scenes that have been introduced, and I'm not proud to have added to that. And in that sense, I don't really care that much if it's adopted as a term because it that's not what matters to me, right? So I I I I don't believe in the power of neologisms all the time, and that you know, we we need a new language and we should make up all these words and then become unreadable. I think you know you have to be strategic in in the sort of new words that you use. And for me, Ecocene is supposed to evoke the invitation to stand on your head and think upside down somehow. So what it's uh dialoguing with is quite obviously the concept of Anthropocene, which I think is a very good one, despite all criticisms, my own myself, my own criticisms included. Not least because it traveled so widely and it really brought something into consciousness. It it foregrounded an issue that I think can be invisible at scale without that term. Um so I I really like it because of that. But it's also a term that to me is primarily geological, it's where it makes a lot of sense is within the discipline of geology and related disciplines. Um I don't know exactly how to to label my word, but let's say I'm a political theorist, right? So in political theory, uh you can't naively import a term from geology and allow it or or pre claim that it does the work of political theory. And there's been a lot of of critique that I won't repeat. I think most of the listeners would know the critiques of the Anthropocene. Marm is not necessarily a critique by by invoking the term ecosene, but it's saying, well, if humans are collectively, um, however problematic that may be, causing a lot of environmental changes, that doesn't mean that they're in the driving seat. That doesn't mean that they're also guiding the process. A lot of it is extremely ignorant, right? Um and sort of haphazard and patchy. The other part of this accuration is the ecology itself, it's how the world is changing. And a lot of times it's b it's those changes that actually drive political and social change. It's the carbon cycle that could be considered to be more in the driving seat than humans. So the term ecosyn is supposed to elicit that that inverse, right, that reversal that saying, what if we consider this not the age of humans, but the age when humans become aware again of the incredible power of the natural world to outmaneuver and force our hand into certain kinds of changes, for better or worse. So I guess the invitation that that the term launches, and again, I think you can do that with with other terms, you can do that without a term, um, but that was the point of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's really useful. And I'm thinking about Anne Polina here, indigenous leaders will often say, well, we need to be conscious about the timescales that we're thinking about when we're talking about challenges for humans, because the earth is gonna recover on whatever geological timescale is appropriate. Maybe it won't work for us, but the earth is really running its own cycles and systems, regardless of what we do. It's just that we're doing it to our own detriment. And that brings me to the next point that I wanna get you to reflect on. And at the start of your book, Eco-Seme Politics, you talk about the need for theories to deal with this situation of environmental loss that we're facing around the world and human despair about the future of planet Earth. And I'm quite intrigued about that because at the moment I feel like hope is having a real moment. Actually, Christy, my co-host, is doing some wonderful um work around U Type Hero's method at the moment, but it's trending to be talking in positive terms about what is quite possibly quite a depressing and negative. Of situation. Was that something to do with the moment in which you were writing your book, which was just after COVID-19? And what do you think about that now?
SPEAKER_01It's a big and and to me important question. But can I go back to the end of your last comment before delving into that?
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_01When you you mentioned Antolina and indigenous traditions, philosophies and and theories, that in a way have never forgotten that the temporality of nature far exceeds our own. And in that sense, have always foregrounded this idea that nature is really the one that's that's driving, right? And I think that most societies have dealt with that insight in one way or another. And the the modern process of development and and and capitalism is sort of a brief hallucination in the history of human cultures on earth that forgets something that obvious. So I think that there's a lot of resources there. And in fact, in the book, I I engage a lot and find a lot of inspiration in Maori political theories, precisely because of because of that. So I think that's important to say as well. And in fact, it also connects with with this idea of hope and utopia, and and maybe we can we can parse that out.
SPEAKER_03Um I I also think that it's sort of become obligatory to be hopeful.
SPEAKER_01And just to on a personal, in a person very personal way, whenever something becomes obligatory, I have to to think about it again, right? Yeah there's something there. There's like if if it becomes too orthodox and and and sort of it it starts taking up too much space, right? And you sort of need to open the window and let some air in. So I I feel that you know that this idea of hope is taking up too much space at the moment. I totally understand why, and my proposal is not against the use of the word. I think there's very legitimate uses. There's there's ways in which hope appears in in literature that I think is is very constructive, it's very good. Some people really, really need that in order to go on, and that's perfectly fine. It'd be absurd to take it as a as a totalizing critique when really what I'm reacting to is the totalizing gesture, right? So I just want to contextualize that my my critique is not meant to go against all sorts of hope, right? It's not it's not about that. Where what it is about is this what what comes with the obligation to be hopeful is a certain kind of of dualism, of a binary of it's either hope or despair. It's either one or the other, and you have to choose hope in order to avoid the other. And there's something to me there that that sort of betrays the human experience, which is never really binary that way. So instead, in the book, I propose to to start with this term that I call lucidity, right? So basically a reckoning with the facts. And factually, we're in pretty bad shape in in many different ways that are relevant to this discussion. So I think the the lucidity of that needs to be central. The question is how do you engage with it without the need to make it into a binary attitude? And this is connected to to a critique of utopia, which I think, again, in in some versions of utopia, it it's a it's a kind of projection into the future that assumes a certain regularity of that future, which we know, again, doesn't really go with with the facts. The future is always surprising, things happen that nobody expects, but appear like small events can be big, and vice versa, and and so on and so forth. So then my my proposal is okay, uh, if we have a kind of lucidity as to the loss we're all undergoing, some much more than others, it has to always be repeated. If we have that kind of lucidity, uh we refuse a certain kind of binary thinking and a certain projection into a supposedly linear future, then then what? And there I think the the book proposes some uh avenues, none of which I hope will become obligatory. Um, and and maybe we can talk about the tendency of some to already become obligatory and how we need to challenge them further. But one uh possible response is to to make things livable, to find joy and pleasure in a world that is intent on making you despair. And I take a lot of inspiration there from areas that have really nothing to do with ecology, but everything to do with the loss of world. And there I think indigenous histories are crucial. And I come across quite a bit of indigenous literature, especially in the decolonial field, that points out that this idea of the urgency of loss is uh, to put it badly, a very white thing. Because, you know, if you're recently talking to a colleague that works in African studies in the Great Lakes region and the Democratic Republic of Congo, it says, you know, the African people have endured loss for six centuries. This is not new, right? So if you if you uncouple that from this very contemporary idea of ecology as something to do with nature, right, out there, and look at it as loss of world, then there's lots of experience and lots of people to talk to that know a lot more about this than folks that haven't had six centuries of loss. What, for instance, in European history, I think I found a lot of inspiration on the writings of Holocaust survivors. In my own history in Romania, I found a lot of inspiration in how people dealt with totalitarianism. Those are levels of potential despair and destruction that we're not not actually experiencing. Right? And yet, and again by we I mean a certain kind of of of audience that I think you and I are both part of. And and yet, in so many of those accounts, what you find are accounts of caring for each other, of playing, uh of finding joy. There's uh a presentation I went to a couple years ago on the path of Mexican migrants through the desert, uh, going to the US and the loss of of life there. And the presentation was about what migrants leave behind. And one of the things that was more striking, striking to me is this picture of discarded playing cards. Right? So you are walking across the desert to likely death, and one of the things you bring with you, even though you have to travel lightly and conspicuously and so on, are playing cards, right? That to me is really powerful. And and it really escapes this ide this this sort of this clench of hope and despair, right? And sort of choose one or the other. That also to me brings the gaze closer to the present, uh, as opposed to to projecting uh the changes that that you want in the world, which again in in some guys there's nothing wrong with. But I think it's important to look at today and what one can do today to make a difference to their immediate environment. So the kind of bringing down to earth, to paraphrase Latour's one of Latour's last uh books, is is to me really important. And a lesson that to me came from having this inversion of eco-cene as opposed to anthropocene.
SPEAKER_00I was just thinking as you were talking in terms of narratives around climate change, is that playing out around Alterua? And they also fall into those two camps often of a crisis narrative or a hopeful narrative. And in fact, for most communities and people who are just getting on with life on the ground, it's both of those things kind of together. Um, and focusing on living and living well, which involves some despair and some hope. I mean, that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01Just to say that there can also be sort of tone-deaf, right? And and say, well, you just have to, you know, focus on on on the now. And but as you say, that's not exactly what I mean, is that everybody has this mixture of hope and despair, but there's something about feeling responsible for the present that I think allows you to live with those in in ways that may be better than just this sort of constant oscillation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think it gives people more options of how to respond because they don't have to choose to be in one camp. They don't have to choose to be either super optimistic or or pessimistic, and that characterize them as a person in their personality, which is always my concern with being a bit pessimistic myself. I wanted to ask you though, too, about another concept you were saying, interrogating concepts that can become too universalized. A lot of your work in both EcoSync politics and in your Rights of Nature book, talk about relationality and also reciprocity, which I often say is a companion concept to relationality. But I feel like we've gone to a point now where there's so much saturation of this idea of relationality that half the time we forget what we're talking about in the first place. And maybe we're we're talking about getting away from binaries and separation between humans and nature and focusing on relatedness between actors and components within an ecosystem, for example, which includes humans. So many of us, especially legal scholars who are a bit slow to the uptake when it comes to theory, have shifted away from assumptions around rights and around law too, and uh tend to be centering relationality in our work. But I wonder increasingly, and Christy and I talk about this quite a lot, whether relationality is a concept that's kind of had its time too.
SPEAKER_01I broadly I agree. Um, I've had this discussion with with colleagues as well, sometimes sort of hushed discussions, right? Uh, because you're like, yeah, you don't want to spoil the the party either, right? And the atmosphere. But I I mean I I I broadly agree to mean the and again, I as you say, I'm I'm guilty of if you want to put it that way, of advancing this this idea of relationality and reciprocity. But I it's this comes back to some threads that we already discussed, and especially this idea that you use concepts to get someplace else. So to me, relationality, reciprocity were very useful when they started being seriously theorized because they showed something else rather than uh individualism, rights, the centering of the personal freedom of the subject, and so on and so forth. It showed that, well, actually, if you think about links of obligation, about responsibilities, the whole picture changes and it allows for new kinds of practices, whether in law or or even in you know how you conduct your your own life. The problem for me is when, to paraphrase Whitehead, we we fall into the the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. In other words, we take a process and make it into a thing. So when then relationality and reciprocity become things to achieve or things to signpost because you you sort of have to to get with the the theoretical times. I think we're we're sort of taking a wrong turn and not really attending to the processes that could be described as relational, but can also be described in other ways. And so to me it's important to sort of uh Wittgenstein had this metaphor of throwing the ladder after it allows you to get to a new place, right? And for him, philosophy was this way of of of sort of therapy in some sense, right? You walk through things, and then once you're done, you throw away the ladder and and you're in a different place. So I, you know, I what would it mean to to take that seriously in terms of relationality and reciprocity? I don't know, but I'm I'm really trying to to work through that as well. Another term, by the way, that I think is in this camp nowadays is ontology, which is also in and goes very well with, you know, if you're saying, well, relationality is ontological, italicized, I've done a lot of this. Just by that you make the argument stronger, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And somehow, you know, I challenge myself to to rethink that and say, well, what do I actually mean? And am I confusing an effect for a cause, or am I betraying a more processual understanding of reality by making this gesture in a way that becomes sort of unthinking and unreflective, right? It it almost becomes an automatism of of thought. And I think we need to to pause when that happens.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think it's exciting to try the new way of thinking through these challenges. And maybe if we throw the latter away at least for a little while, it allows us to think of some other concepts that might help us to think through some of these challenges. And interestingly, a lot of these words start with R's. And that conference that I organized at the end of last year was four R's. It was rights, relationality, resilience, and reciprocity. But there's another R that you use quite a lot in your work, which is, I think, less fashionable, but I also do some work in this space, and that's restoration. But you use the term I think renovation. And you talk about this in your book, Eco Sing Politics, and you start from the position which I also share, that people don't actually need to be bad for nature. They can engage in reciprocal relationships with nature. Um, and one of the positive things that they can do is restoration or renovation. But for me coming into this field of restoration and and being quite new to it actually, with my new research around blue carbon, I'm seeing how much this field of restoration is dominated by technocrats. So it's dominated by physical scientists and economists who are measuring a state of decline or recovery in an ecosystem against a baseline, typically, and attempting to attach sort of metrics to it or or dollar signs to it. And I mean, there are political theorists engaging in this space like you, but I think their voices are to a large degree drowned out by the technocrats. But you're arguing that the idea of restoration itself is a political idea. And I just would like to take up the opportunity to have you tell us what do you think about this field of restoration as it's emerging?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think that's one one term that I I try to propose as you know, taking a sidestep from relationality and reciprocity, for example, right? And and saying, well, let's think about restoration or renovation. Um I don't really care much which which one you use. I I go back and forth. I haven't been very theoretically rigorous when it comes to choosing that term. So yeah, I think restoration starts its life in, first of all, in in colonial history, particularly of North America. So it has a very problematic beginnings, just like ecology at large. So I think that that needs to also be understood, and then mutates into this very technical, as you say, engineering management-dominated endeavor. And in as much as it becomes political, it really is a matter of policy rather than politics, because it doesn't, so the the the politics for me is when power relations are foregrounded. And restoration as policy makes it seem as if it's operating on the smooth political background where nobody's losing, basically. And that that tends to never be the case. There's also a meaning of it in restoration ecology, which is part of its history, where it's the idea of returning a damaged ecosystem to a baseline, also to a state in the past pre-damage, so to speak. And it again has deep roots in colonial histories where native people were often portrayed as the ones doing the damage, and therefore their expulsion was a way to restore a predisturbance, quote unquote, uh, state of the environment. So also in the ecological idea of restoration, I think needs careful engagement with and goes very well with the management and technocratic application of it. All of that being said, there is political theorists and some ecologists as well that have engaged with this term in a less binary way. So against the idea that people are inherently bad for nature, which is part of sort of binary thinking, and also against the idea that there is a nature out there to be restored, and a human that manages that process when in fact we are extremely ignorant about how nature works. So the the chances that, and and there's tons of stories of restoration initiatives going horribly wrong because we we just have a very limited understanding. So if you take those two things seriously and say, okay, uh people can be good for nature, and it's always about a particular process of interaction with the natural world and not a separation, then I think restoration becomes potentially very exciting. And the way that I've been trying to theorize it is um as a process, and I'll come back to that, I think it's important, as a process that is not about nature and restoring a state of nature, but rather about reinventing a relationship that allows people to be good for the environment. And that's a very different kind of focus that has a lot of implications that are not yet fully sort of reckoned with. One implication is that restoration is about rebuilding attentiveness and the ability to uh engage sensitively with the natural environment. And that's something I think you can tell the history of modernity as a progressive loss of that ability, where we so many people live in literal environments that totally cut them off from the sensitivity of understanding the workings of that environment around them. So, one way in which restoration interventions, like restoring a wetland, a prairie, a park, can be focused on the restoration of this important skill that has been shown to be crucial for human well-being, by the way, of paying attention to the natural world in a meaningful way. That also means that restoration can be about the creation of that kind of meaning. It can also be about the restoration of certain kinds of skills of engagement in ways where you become a positive member of a wider natural community. It also means that restoration can be very ordinary and about places that are not interesting from a conservation perspective. And to me, that's really key because most people live in these places that are considered sort of banal and uninteresting because they don't host whatever species. And I think that's that, you know, it really opens up the field of restoration uh to potentially any environment, inasmuch as the idea is uh to restore a certain kind of relationship that can be generative. And lastly, uh that also means that restoration is not a project but a process. In other words, if that's what it's about, the restoration of ordinary skills of attachment and engagement, then you can't just do it once and be done with it. It's something that has to be reiterative and it has to repeat itself in order to sustain a new kind of understanding of yourself as part of of a wider environment. And all of that I think has has political implications, which is why I say, you know, uh restoration can also be uh be a political concept. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a space as political and starting to study. Carbon markets and blue carbon markets and restoration projects in the coastal space, really, even if it is dominated by technocrats. I think too, yeah, I that's really useful thinking of it as a process because it also helps to avoid some of the really arbitrary measurement dynamics that come up in restoration. You know, like do we do we measure success as at a 25-year period or a 100-year period of restoration and then we declare these projects as having failed? But it depends what you're measuring in terms of whether it's been a successful project or a failure. So is that work around restoration? Are you continuing that in other projects beyond the EcoStream Politics book?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so there's certain paths that that book opened that I'm I'm following through now. And and one of them is this project that I recently started with a with a small team on olive or olive culture in southern Italy, specifically in the Puglia region, where there's a millennial co-habitation of people with olive trees. And about 15 years ago, the this olive tree started suffering from uh from a disease caused in part by by a bacterium that has killed millions of them. So you're literally looking at a case of loss, uh coming back to what we were talking about before, that's absolutely massive and causing irreparable damage. You do not get back an olive grove that was planted 700 years ago and that you've inherited through generations. So it's it's it's an unspeakable tragedy. Now part of what is lost there is also a certain way of tending to the environment that has created this creatures, these beings, these incredible trees over centuries. Because if you don't interact in a certain kind of way, they're not even trees. Olive olive plants are bushes. So the the very creation of of the tree is very much an an act of intergenerational interaction. So in the context of this millennial culture of olive cultivation, um the creation of of a certain of two different kinds of beings, actually. One is this this extraordinary olive tree uh that has incredible sort of qualities and characteristics. And also olive people in a way, right? So people that uh know how to attend to this intergenerational relay. Now all of that is is being lost through the this this disease which is called uh olive quick dis quick decline syndrome. And so basically the whole crown dies, it dries out. Uh and you get this incredibly sad cemetery of of dead olive trees. Now some things are are happening that are completely surprising that that nobody expected. Some trees that have been dry for a decade are starting to re-sprout. A lot of plantations have been replaced with solar panels and uh intensive agriculture, so there's all sorts of things going on, which are responses to loss. Some of the responses are of the tree itself, and some of the folks that were patient enough that that stuck with olive time are starting to see uh a resprouting, and others have have moved on to building different kinds of relationships with with the land. And so this for me is a is a new different soil, if you want, for thinking about this idea of lucidity and also the idea of uncertainty. We we just don't know what our partners, in this case the olive tree, but also the bacterium itself, will end up doing. Within this context, it's very interesting to think about the idea of restoration because there is no ecological baseline. Right? So you're you're out of that straitjacket right away. And it's it's a much clearer situation in which to think about restoration of a certain kind of relationship. And the the challenge is to to do this and to to think about it in in ways that that move beyond some of the the terms and the concepts that we've been talking about and allow the the field itself to to suggest new avenues of of interpretation and and of thinking together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think forgetting the idea of baseline would be really liberating, especially in a lot of contexts, especially we're seeing it now with biodiversity credits being developed, but and also in the c in the carbon climate context, and those baselines are often quite arbitrary dates, like just 1992, because that's when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed. So that's the date of that that you measure. So if you plant a tree after 1992, you get a credit. If the tree was standing before 1992, you don't get a credit. So yeah, I'm really looking forward to engaging with more of your work around that in a beautiful story of olive trees. We have this disease called Cody dieback in Altero. I don't know if you heard about it when you were here, but they're our sort of our most ancient kind of grandfather trees that are dying, especially up north with a disease. Yeah, similar stories of loss. But there aren't many, I I feel like there aren't a lot of people looking at these issues coming from the humanities or even the social sciences. And so I do want to ask you kind of a boring question about methodology and methods, because you are very interdisciplinary and your work definitely draws on political theory, legal theory, constitutional theory, a bit of anthropology, a bit of geography, and of course ecology. But ecology and I guess science seems very important in your work. And maybe I'm not moving in the right circles, but I can't think of too many other people who do this kind of boundary crossing work that you do. And I wondered why you thought ecology was so important in the context of all of these other disciplines when you're looking at them from the perspective of philosophy or from theory. And do you find that difficult work to do?
SPEAKER_01For me, I mean there's there's different things I want to say about that. The f the first is that ecology offers a certain kind of anchoring in what we think we know about a particular the workings of a particular place. And I feel that a lot of times in you know, people that write on on environmental politics and things like that are missing that. Uh they don't necessarily engage with what ecologists are saying, and vice versa. A lot of ecologists work under the impression that uh if only you describe things well enough, then everything else follows in terms of policy and and politics. And I think you know there's there's a way to to have people have conversations across these disciplines. And that itself is part of the answer to your question is collaborations. You can't be a one-person band, that's not necessarily even desirable. And so you have collaborations, and in this project, I'm collaborating with with a bunch of people to to understand, for instance, the characteristics of soil, the communities of insects, what uh pathogens mean in different disciplines, and and so on and so forth. Is that difficult? I mean, in in some senses it's more difficult, especially when it comes to publications. I find that they take longer and it's often hard to find a venue. I've had this issue in the past with collaborations, for instance, with uh cartographers, where you really have like, you know, GIS type stuff with political theory, and it's it was it took a long time to publish. But I I think to me it's some of the most exciting uh work that I've that I've done. On the other hand, I'm increasingly sort of coming to question uh the idea of ecology itself, and that comes mostly from my engagement in the last years with uh decolonial ecologies and decolonial studies, where that it really does carry a very heavy baggage. And I'm it I've I've come to see it increasingly as a potentially very reductive science, even though it seems to be a very holistic science. And to me, what's most valuable in ecology is that it foregrounds the reality of uncertainty and it populates our understanding with more and more things that matter that we didn't know about. That's sort of the core that makes me stick with this. But that's just a part of the science of ecology. A lot of it doesn't do that at all, and that sort of roots out uncertainty and presents things as if you know they're they're much more solid than they actually are in the field. So for me, this you know, the the science of ecology that embraces this kind of natural dynamism and remains somewhat humble is what's uh what's really exciting. And that in itself is something that is useful for, for instance, political theorists.
SPEAKER_00When I was part of another research project, which was about ecosystem-based management in the marine context, and that as a theoretical framework for this science project was influenced by ecologists who were in the leadership of that research program. And then there was sort of this desire to kind of shoehorn mataranga or indigenous knowledge and law tikanga into the program because if if ecology or if an ecosystem is a very inclusive concept and all things are related to each other and come together and humans are part of it, then then different knowledge systems could be part of it too. But I I always got the impression that the indigenous researchers who were part of the program felt very uncomfortable with their world being shoehorned within this concept, which had its own genealogy that came from a different place. In a different world. Yeah, so I can I I saw that play out. In the end, the indigenous researchers just expressed their discomfort and collaborated with everyone who was involved in the program. And it was good enough for that, but it did make me think about process and doing things right from the start. That maybe there is another concept that's more accommodating of multiple worlds.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's not the first time I I I hear sort of a version of that of that story, but it's still I think important to stick with that conversation and to have people in the same room that don't necessarily share basic assumptions. And I think when the discussion turns to the basic assumptions of a science of a particular worldview, it's it's really it has great potential for changing also the way in which ecology is understood and and practiced.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And so another practical question for you. How you're doing a lot of research, you're involved in multiple collaborations, projects, funded projects, uh writing all the time, writing books, writing journal articles. How do you balance these sorts of big projects with just having a normal life? And what advice would you give to early career researchers who are trying to follow a similar path?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Do I do I need to have an answer to that question? Yeah, it's probably the least inspirational thing I can say. I think, you know, everybody finds their way. But just a couple things that come to mind is that I try to to find a pleasure in the work, and it you know, if if it becomes sort of drudgery, it's it's really hard to to do and to do well. So keeping that that pleasure I think is important. But then also being pragmatic and understanding that it's also just a job. And at the end of the day, there's certain things you have to do and and you do them. Not all of it is gonna be gonna be exciting. And also lastly, as you advance in this career, there's different stages that require very different uh attitudes and skills, and I feel like we're not really taught that. So I think it's important to keep to be to sort of stay humble and flexible, not get stuck in one mode of doing things. I don't know if I'm following that advice, by the way.
SPEAKER_00No, I think you are. You're doing all sorts of different things.
SPEAKER_01That's all I have.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that's part of keeping interested in what you're doing and finding passion in it and enjoying it, is mixing it up, I think, in terms of collaborations and new projects. So Yeah, well, thank you so much, McNia. It's been great to have you on Lore at the End of the World. Lovely to catch up with you again, and I really look forward to seeing what you do next.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Leslie. It was such a pleasure talking.
SPEAKER_04That was such a great conversation. I've been a really big fan, and I'm going to completely stack off his name. So I've seen Minias work for a really long time. Um, and I particularly use um his book, Understanding the Rights of Nature, in teaching, because even though he's a very deep, thoughtful scholar, the book is really accessible, and students find it a really good way in to try to grapple with some of the complexity of the issue. And he he does nuance really well, and I really respect that. And I think what really comes through in the conversation you guys had was how seriously he takes this idea that our concepts can become obstacles as much as they can be tools. That the same kind of terminology or words or sort of ways of thinking that we use to open up ideas can also start to close them down again if we're not careful. And I think you and I have these conversations a lot, not always on the podcast. But sometimes we really grapple with this sort of you know, something that we found really generative at one point we're starting to get really tired of or sick of, and how to navigate that. And I don't find any neat solutions. And I think what's really striking about the conversation is that Min doesn't try and wrap them up neatly either. It's not like he's trying to sort of say there are these really neat solutions. He's really sitting within that complexity and thinking it through and trying to hold them lightly, and I really respect that. But there are a few things that I really wanted to pick up on, and the first was just this concept of eco-scene. I really like the prompt from terms like eco-scene, of you know, that we should stop thinking of this as an age where humans are in the driver's seat and start thinking of it as an age where natural systems are forcing our hand, as in fact, as they always have done. Um, I think we definitely need to drop the pretense that we're in control. And I also think there's a real benefit in moving away from terms like the Anthropocene. There's a risk with the term Anthropocene that we implicate all humans equally in responsibility for the climate crisis. And in fact, most humans are not responsible for driving the systems that have led to the crisis, and some are the least responsible and being and in fact suffering the most. And so there's a kind of unhelpful equality implied in kind of implicating everyone equally. So, you know, things like the carbon cycle or ecological collapse or diseases we saw recently, they're all shaping politics and society in ways that go well beyond human decision making. But it, you know, my partner always corrects me when I inadvertently use terms like natural disaster. Yes. And he says that language really obscures the responsibility of some humans, at least, or at least some human systems like capitalism in creating these disasters, and that I should drop the natural from that in order to really hold to acknowledge that accountability or that responsibility. And so there's an interesting tension between both of these points. And I think that's a theme here that we we can't actually choose one or the other. We do need the humility of accepting that we're not in control and that we're not that powerful. But we also need to accept some degree of accountability or at least to demand some degree of accountability for those aspects that are in fact the result of human action. And so trying to navigate that is always an interesting process. I like the way that Ninja connects the idea of the Eco Scene to indigenous traditions that have never treated humanity as being a barrel in control of the rest of the world. Again, that humility. And I agree that this temporality that nature will continue on after us, and the humility that's required to understand that isn't novel. And in fact, it's a very small blip, a very small aberration of modernism that has actually tried to think somehow that we're unable to separate ourselves from those things and that we're more important. So all of that, you know, was super interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you've spoken about that a lot in terms of the histories of relationality that you can find in all cultures if you go back beyond capitalism or modernity. I'm fascinated by these new scenes that seem to pop up around the way. You know, there's the the foolist scene, I always forget how you pronounce that one because it's a C at the start. Yeah, the capitalist scene. There are there are lots of different scenes and they're all doing different work. They're all trying to draw attention to particular remaining injustices or imbalances or assumptions, I think, in the way that we look at the age that we're in right now and how we should be responding to the sorts of challenges that we're facing. Erin spoke last episode about this concept of the symbiote scene, which is, yeah, it is an interesting kind of um relational approach to from how I understood her explaining it, was an era when we realize our deep interconnectedness and interdependence with nature around us. And I kind of wonder, listening to Miknia speak a little bit bashfully about not wanting to add to the list of scenes out there in the world, I kind of wonder if that if there'll be more or if that's done if if that particular point's been made. Yeah, but I can absolutely understand why he coined that term, and I think it's useful one. It's a it's a useful way of challenging um this idea of the anthropos and and the human being. Central.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I guess they're all just useful lenses at the end of the day, and and we we shouldn't just stick with one, and I think that's probably the ultimate point, which I guess brings me to another part that that I I really um valued, which was this focus on lucidity. I mean, I think for one, his point about communities with a long experience of loss is important and it's often underacknowledged in a lot of environmental discourse, which talks about you know, this sort of urgency or this kind of unique moment that we're in now, where suddenly we're faced with this very particular form of loss and dispossession. And there's an erasure that comes from that narrative that ignores the loss that came with colonization and some of the devastation that occurred centuries ago when lands were invaded and when there was massive loss during those periods. And and so that that reminder to be really careful, I think, is is a very important one. And of course, I have to pick up on the discussion around hope and utopia. Um, I was really struck by his comment that hope's almost become obligatory, that there's this sort of mandatory optimism that's papering over people's genuine despair, and that that people feel forced into a binary choice. I I so get where he's coming from. Whenever something feels obligatory, I automatically want to reject it. But it's so funny because one of the reasons why I think I've been quite committed to hope was that in the circles that I've been moving in, I felt the opposite. I felt like being cynical and being pragmatic was almost compulsory. And so you couldn't be respected as somebody who was a serious scholar without just sitting either totally within critique, or at least if you were to propose something else that had to be incredibly pragmatic and it had to be kind of accepting of existing systems, just kind of tinkering at the edges, and that if you started to venture beyond critique or that kind of very pragmatic proposal for reform, then you were seen as being kind of a lightweight, like excessively idealistic. And and the the word utopia there, not so much in terms of coming up with this fully formed vision of the society, but just being untethered. From realism and therefore not being very serious. And so for me, exactly the same reaction leading to a kind of the opposite response or the opposite direction. And I I've really enjoyed framings that also reject this binary in the way that Minya was talking about. And so, like Rebecca Solman, for example, in her book Hope in the Dark, which is quite dated now, but she really talks around hope being about acting without knowing the outcome, that it lives in uncertainty, in the dark, and that it totally sits with the despair of the moment. But that, and there's no confidence in any predictions, but it says, But I I'm going to do the work anyway, that there's still something to be done. And Paul Offrere, whose book, Pedagogy of Hope, he grounds it in solidarity and struggle, which also has some real resonance with the conversation you guys were having. And it's not so much an attitude, so much as an orientation that emerges from being committed to change alongside and in solidarity with other people, again, doing the work. And neither of those are kind of totalizing sort of linear progress or modernist kind of versions that I think were being justifiably critiqued. But instead, they're very similar to that kind of caring conditions of loss that are tending to the present. But I would have described those as hope. And I think you know that comes from what we're responding to in a lot of ways. And similarly with utopia, you know, there is an absolute version of utopia that's about certainty and it's about sort of sketching out this ideal society and this programmatic approach to ensuring that it takes place. And it's associated with authoritarianism, with a particular version of Marxism, and it's frankly really scary. And it denies autonomy, and it also is incredibly hubristic, like it assumes that we have any idea what the future holds, which was never the case and is now farcical to even pretend. But there's this kind of whole other kind of version of play within the idea of utopia that's more around these sort of um practices of prefigurative politics or prefigurative legality. And those are about building the world you want in the here and now in a really small scale, often temporary, often tentative kind of ways. So in relationships or little institutions or in practices that are in the here and now. And these aren't based on a blueprint, and they're not based on having everything figured out or being sure about what's coming. It's in the doing and it's in the now that you're that you're engaging in those prefigurative politics. And in in a lot of ways, that seems very close to what was being discussed. Like even the playing cards on the journey, you know, there's an element there where you're still creating moments of care and of solidarity and of pleasure and play in the midst of loss, in the midst of despair. And it's being able to hold both of those concepts together in tension, which I think is often foregrounded in those discussions.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and you make a really good point about people criticising work for being unrealistic. Because if I think back to sort of coming up for 10 years ago when we first really started writing quite a lot about relational governance regimes, legal personhood, rights of nature, those sorts of things, the answer that we usually got was that what we were saying was completely ridiculous and completely unrealistic. Today, a lot of the people who dismissed or ignored that work that we were doing are now really interested in it, in framing up research projects about it or holding, you know, UN level kind of meetings about it and things. So I think definitely if there aren't some people working at unrealistic spaces, including Mihne and you and I and Erin Alessandro, other many other people who we've had on the podcast who have been working on this stuff for a long time, longer than than us, um, then maybe some of those things wouldn't have got the attention in the scholarship that they have gotten and allowed other people to then take that work forward. I do think that Mihnia has been quite deliberate in his interview and saying that he's not against hope or utopia. These are useful concepts in particular contexts. He's just noting, as I think I am, that they're taking up quite a lot of space right now. And in ecosystem politics, in particular, towards the end, he touches on his personal experience of failed utopias and totalitarian regimes, and that's a bit of a, you know, a reminder of that. But I think, as I said at the beginning too, there are different contexts for doing different things, and I think including some hope when you're teaching young minds is really important. I really enjoyed the excerpt that we can link to, hopefully, in the show notes, Christy, of you talking about hope in teaching environmental law, because I do think there's a risk of of really alienating uh the next generation of environmental lawyers if we're not careful, if they feel like really there's no point doing that work. And there are also well-being and mental health issues that we need to be sensitive about when we're talking about these sorts of issues with young people. For me personally, in my work with communities on the ground, when I'm doing field work, when I'm building relationships with communities in Aotearoa, and in our particular cultural context, and I will caveat this with the point that this is purely observational and this is not academic at all, but these are just my observations. I don't personally find that that either hope or despair resonate very much with what I'm saying on a day-to-day basis, but maybe it's the words and not the concepts behind them. I definitely don't think that despair helps motivate people very much. And I observed in particular in the context of climate action that communities seem to really reject a risk threat narrative. You see that a lot in the context of disasters and disaster law, this real kind of like, this threat's coming at you, you need to plan now. That tends to really turn people off. What um makes people feel more willing to take action is a focus on thriving in abundance and a focus on relational connection between them and their lives and the communities and the places where they live and and being able to work through adversity in the future. And I guess that's also not a blind optimism kind of thing. It's it's getting on with the day-to-day of life, like the playing cards and it's getting on to with the day-to-day life, but but surely definitely wanting to have something positive to work towards. So I think there's a bit of work that that both hope and despair need to do, but I feel like they're kind of like ingredients in a soup that are all sort of mixed up together, rather than being able to pull out one or the other and and choose which side to be on for sure.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely. So another point that I wanted to pick up on was this um point about restoration. So, like both of you, this is an issue that I've explored a little bit in my work, much less than particularly the current focus of yours, Liz. And I think you're both making this really important intervention in shifting the conversation around restoration away from this kind of technocratic baseline model. Yeah. You know, that that model tries to restore systems to a so-called predisturbance state, measured perhaps against an arbitrary date and then declared at some point as a success or failure, as though these are all kind of clear, delineated things that we can kind of measure and and uh evaluate. And you you both focus on something more relational, more procedural, and that that kind of really seriously contends with the fact that we're in this process of constant change and flux. A couple of years ago, John, Alex, Katie, and Erin, and I wrote quite a short article that we called uh legal kinsugi, and in it we propose the idea of relational repair. Now, kinsugi might not have been the best word, at least because none of us are Japanese, and I think obviously there's some issues there. But we I guess we were just really struck by that kind of image of the gold threaded through the pottery. Um, you know, this kind of inspiration from this practice of repairing broken pottery with gold so that the cracks become part of the beauty of the object rather than something to hide or erase or pretend didn't happen. And I guess it was trying to draw on that kind of visual image. And we were trying to avoid this kind of idea of returning to a mythical past and to bring the focus back on repairing relationships rather than the ecological systems themselves. But it's something that I I kind of haven't done more on since that day as a central theme of my work, but I'm really interested in it. And this this work that we're doing at the moment around water theft, I think, is probably the closest to trying to contend with that, but in a very practical sense, in you know something something very tangible and very specific, and trying to work through what that might look like in that context. Um and again, it it leads to yes and rather than either or. It's very much that there's a whole bunch of things that are needed as ingredients together in order to make these processes and these regulatory responses work on the ground, as far as we can tell. So that's been interesting to sort of start to work through with Rachel and Erin.
SPEAKER_00We should definitely link to the legal Kitsugi paper too. Yeah. I I think there are lots of there's a lot of opportunity to be thinking through the sorts of theoretical issues that we've thought through in the context of rights, in the context of restoration. But I I think there's a need for more research in that field. I really enjoyed Miknia's stories about the olive trees, and I just felt that was such an evocative kind of research program and context to be working through those sorts of issues. And I think there are many other case studies of restoration projects and of people taking care of local urban environments. There's been a lot of research on that in the past, but I think new ways of thinking through theoretical challenges. It seems to me, and I know we're going to talk about this concept that Mikna spoke about, throwing the ladder away. And if the ladder's relationality, and we've used relationality a lot, but actually the way he was talking about restoration, it he hasn't thrown the ladder away completely. He's kind of picked up the ladder and and used it to get over onto another island, maybe, or another into another tree. I'm not quite sure what the analogy is, but he's using it to get somewhere else. And yeah, I what did you think about this? I hadn't heard this analogy before, but I understand what he's trying to say, and I I think we can reflect on it more.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. A big part of my response here is that I've been frustrated lately, feeling as though relationality has just become this meaningless buzzword. Like it's just tucked onto everything. And I recognize that ontology is really going the same way. It depends on what field you're in, how kind of saturated it is, why not? But I have these reservations around throwing the ladder away, and I recognize that they're actually they're more contextual than anything else. So, you know, the point here is that when the philosophy is done its therapeutic work, you throw the ladder away because you're in a new place and you don't need it anymore. And on a personal level, clearly this has enormous value. It's kind of like getting rid of your crutch. But if you step back and you shift that focus into a different context, say into scholarly communities or one thing, obviously it's been occupying my thoughts a lot, is the classroom, then there's a real risk of getting rid of the ladder too quickly because there's still students or other people doing really important work who are climbing that ladder or who are using it, so to speak. And so if they're still using these concepts as bridges into new ways of thinking, then I worry that if we move on too quickly, then either we risk just talking to ourselves or making these concepts or these conversations more inaccessible. And for some people, they're already very heavily jargony and difficult. And this isn't actually a critique of what Minya was saying. It's more, it's just this issue that I've been struggling with is that I do get really sick of things and I like to move on, but then I find that the conversation's carrying on behind me, and I'm like, oh, there's more people talking about that now, but I've like rejected it, you know, like I've I've moved on and and I can't join those conversations anymore. And and it's it's just it's an awkward tension. Um, and you know, also there's conversations that I arrive at 20 years after the fact, and I'm like, hello, can we talk about this now that I've just discovered it? So you know, it's not that I'm like a head of the game, it's that we're all coming through these cycles in at different times. We discover different concepts or authors or theories for various reasons at different rates. And if if they're kind of now like old hat or like not cool anymore, then there are things that happen as a result of it. I think that one way of doing that while avoiding something becoming an orthodoxy or becoming too sort of set in stone in a really unhelpful way for everyone involved, is to do exactly what Mini's sort of recommending and what he clearly was doing throughout the conversation, which to hold concepts really lightly and to stay curious about where they're helping and when they're helping and when they're actually getting in the way, and to keep bringing people into the conversation rather than leaving them behind.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I enjoyed too when he was talking about avoiding the temptation to invent a new term of art, you know, that we don't necessarily need a new ism or a new ology to describe everything. I think sometimes what happens probably in the field of political theory, where he's working quite a lot because he's in this thinking space all the time, but we also see it come up in other fields that we're looking at, including in sociol studies, is that somebody feels that they've coined a new term of art. And like, say, for example, rights of nature. I know that's been around for a very long time, and there are probably other examples, but I feel like rights of nature can't be pinned on anyone in particular. So I'm just going to use that as an example for now. And if if you feel like you've kind of coined that term and that's made you famous, and that's your tagline for your publications and also for other people's publications who want to cite you, then sometimes people stick with those ideas maybe longer than they should for themselves. So I guess another point is about we should absolutely keep thinking and criticizing our own theories and the theories that we allow to dominate the way that we make sense of the world. Other people might still have more work to do with those theories, but we shouldn't necessarily limit ourselves in that way. I personally find that I have no choice but to keep doing it, but mostly because I just get bored of hearing myself saying the same thing over and over. And I feel like because of the way that the academic publishing process works, I mean, you generally do work on multiple pieces at one time, and they might take a few years to come out. By the time they've finally come out, you just think, oh God, am I still talking about that? Am I still talking about relationality? So there's that. But I think too, the world just keeps keeps giving us new material. Like the world keeps showing us contradictions. It keeps showing us the exception to the rule all the time. And so yeah, I think it's inevitable that we have these new terms and new ways of seeing the world come up. And I kind of I was kind of hoping that Minnia would just tell me what the next one is. But he didn't. But maybe we need another conversation about that. Okay, so our next section is what's new in environmental law. In this section, we discuss any developments in environmental law, including legislation, judgments, publications, and news. So Christy, do you have any updates to share?
SPEAKER_04I really don't have many. And I was telling you before, Liz, that I can't work out if I'm correct that not a huge amount has happened. Or if, as I suspect, it's also the fact that I've just been really busy and I haven't noticed a few things happen. So apologies to anyone out there thinking, my gosh, a really significant thing happened and you just completely ignored it. Um, but I do want to talk about a handful of things. So, first of all, the Woodside case, which I've talked about a number of times. This is the case of Australian Conservation Foundation, and there's also one from the charity Friends of Australian Rock Art, and they're both challenging Woodside's Northwest Gas field extension in the federal court. The matter will be heard from the 21st to the 27th of July. And I think I mentioned quite briefly last week that the UN Special Reporteur on Human Rights and the Environment applied to intervene in the case, and her application had been accepted by the court. So, really, this is a very small update just to say she filed her legal submissions in the first week of June. And her focus, quite logically, was that the minister had failed to address the human rights impacts of the project. Now, that is pretty bog standard for a global sort of discussion around these issues, particularly in light of the International Court of Justice's climate advisory opinion, where this was a really central part of the way that they address the climate crisis and government obligations. But in the Australian context and in the WA context, human rights are really not core to the way that we expect decision making by government. And so I think it will be very interesting to see how this case plays out and how this submission is treated. There could be a kind of not particularly interesting outcome, which is that it just kind of gets dismissed out of hand. And that wouldn't be shocking given Australia's kind of general culture around human rights at the Commonwealth and the WA level. But there have been shifts towards taking this into account more clearly. And this is probably the first time since the International Court of Justice's climate advisory opinions that this will have been considered by a higher court. And so yeah, I'm I'm really intrigued to see what happens. And it it feels like high stakes because it feels like a little bit of a fork in the road. It's not the high court, which is our highest court, but it it's still quite a significant case. And so watching that play out will be very interesting. Speaking of WA, another development that I wanted to mention relates to native title and Aboriginal cultural heritage processes in WA. Now, this could have, but doesn't actually relate to any legal changes. But there was an inquiry report, it's called the Kelly Report, and it was a review that was commissioned to examine native title and Aboriginal cultural heritage processes in relation to Western Australia's mining and exploration sector. And it's called the Kelly Report because it was, or review, because it was conducted by Glenn Kerry, who was the former CEO of the Southwest Aboriginal Land and Sea Council and is now a member of the National Native Title Tribunal. The report, uh, or the inquiry that led to the report included a range of regional forums and engagements with Aboriginal stakeholders, industry, and government agencies. So it's quite wide-ranging. And although it was delivered in February, it was finally tabled in Parliament, in WA Parliament on the 9th of June, and that's why we're hearing about it now. The government's response hasn't focused on legislative change. Instead, it's focused on a few key initiatives. Um, a new default heritage standard for exploration projects, statewide support strategy to build the capacity of Native title parties, a voluntary certification process or certification process for heritage consultants, and a pre-application mediation service before so-called Section 18 heritage approvals. Obviously, that's under the Aboriginal Heritage Act, that this particular process. Now, these all sound pretty measured and constructive, but in the political context of WA, you need to read a little bit between the lines. And if you look at the media reporting around this report or this review, you can see some of the controversy that's kind of being drummed up and what some of these are kind of hinting at as being responses to the sort of politics around heritage law in WA. So one example is coverage in WA Today, which has focused really heavily on industry responses and voices in response to this review. So the Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA and the Association of Mineral Mining and Exploration Companies have both used their reports released to push this really old narrative that's quite established in WA that the system is too slow, it's too expensive, and that consultants have become, to use their words, the primary beneficiaries of the process. So the idea that they're pushing is that instead of traditional owners benefiting from this process, these kind of leeches of these consultants are kind of taking money out of the system. And so they've cited quite specific kind of statistics or figures to support this narrative. And so there's been an Industry Commission survey that says that it takes an average of 552 days to comply with heritage legislation. Obviously, underlying that, there's this idea that obviously getting the Post the approval through is the outcome that everyone wants. Um and it's it's just a matter of speeding that up. Yeah. That the so surveys cost more than $20,000, $3,000 a day, and that for every $100 spent on compliance, $60 goes to external consultants, while only $4 reaches traditional owners directly. But this has been really critiqued in other areas. So Dr. Anna Fagan, for example, who's a heritage professional, and she wrote an article in response to this in the National Indigenous Times, has pointed out that these figures have been really strict of their context. And so heritage surveys are actually not able to be conducted year-round. They're constrained by seasons, remote logistics, cultural protocols like sorry, business and law time and safety requirements. And so the day rate reflects all of these constraints. They only relate to the days that they actually can take place rather than multiplying that, for example, by all of the days that they say that it takes. She also says that, you know, this is really a very deliberate framing. And that the media article, for example, hasn't cited any traditional owners or Aboriginal organizations, even though supposedly this is focused on Aboriginal cultural heritage protection. And probably most importantly, these independent heritage advisors are actually one of the few mechanisms that enable Aboriginal organizations to actually interrogate the data that's being put forward in development applications by industry and that enable them to navigate what is actually a really legally complex and under-resourced system. So there's a real question of well, if we cut costs around those processes, who's benefiting and who is losing out in that process? And the narrative that's being used is completely obscuring that fact. So, yeah, look, it's really notable, I think, that this is a jurisdiction that lived through the destruction of the Duca Gorge. And the current responses that we're seeing, both from government and from the media, really aren't offering a lot of hope. But there's a really serious attitude here about trying to prevent the risk of reoccurrence of those kinds of devastating incidents. Instead, they're very focused on efficiency and of making this whole process work better for mining.
SPEAKER_00Enabling development. I think too, I mean, I yeah, because I um our listeners might not know, but for a long period of time before I became an academic, I was the principal lawyer for what was then Aboriginal Affairs Victoria and in in the state of Victoria in Australia, and the main legislation that we were responsible for was the Aboriginal Heritage Act. And like that's going back to the to the mid-2000s now, that the Aboriginal Heritage Act in Victoria was developed. And we were hearing all of that then, all of those sorts of arguments being put forward by developers, and they were very much wanting to just fast-track development and enable it. But there's a also quite a bit of kind of ontology and world that makes its way into that. Like if somebody threatened to go to your local cemetery and rip up the graves where your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were buried, I don't think many people would feel very happy about that. Um, but there's this this is this sort of assumption that aboriginal cultural heritage, even when it goes back like tens or hundreds of thousands of years, is not as valuable as Victorian heritage, for example. So I think it's really sad to see that still playing out. And and that people obviously haven't learned through through some of these massive tragedies that have happened. Like I'm, you know, I'm mostly usually disappointed in what's happening in Altierwa, but I'm very disappointed.
SPEAKER_04And yeah, and underlying all of this discussion, really, not the critical discussion, but the industry and the government and the media discussion, is the assumption of a yes. It's how this development will go ahead, not whether it will go ahead. They're not countenancing the idea that maybe they just shouldn't be doing it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04It's about how and how quickly. So it's it's kind of well, where can we move those graves? And do we really have to like mark the next ones up carefully, or can we just bulldoze them? It's not a big deal, they're dead. Like it it's yeah, it's pretty disrespectful, frankly. But it's all being masked in this language of consultants and lawyers being too expensive rather than really contending with what it is that they're having to deal with. And why is it expensive? What are they wading through and trying to navigate that makes that process so expensive and time consuming? That's not something that's yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's often when they're not engaging in advance effectively with communities and th so things get contentious. And there are some places where development shouldn't happen. Yeah. Yeah, and and it's not even dealing with that, yeah.
SPEAKER_04So then there were two other points that I wanted to talk about again. They're not really legal developments, but so Australia is not hosting COP31 this year, the conference of the parties, but they are assuming the presidency. So this is kind of an unusual arrangement that they came to with Turkey. And so our climate minister, Chris Bowen, has recently responded to this role of presidency by actually acknowledging that Australia's fossil fuel export industry does face a shrinking global market as many of our trading partners commit to net zero. He's framed this in an optimistic way. He's argued that Australia is well paced to so-called pivot, potentially becoming a renewable energy superpower by exporting green hydrogen or electricity or clean energy-intensive products like green AI, I don't know what that means, and data center services. But what I'm really most interested in is this admission that our future might actually not lie in being a quarry for fossil fuels for the rest of the world. Because this actually feels like a turning point in Australian politics, and I'm totally here for it. I don't understand the superpower stuff, I'm just going to set that aside. But the fact that we're actually starting to acknowledge that this role that we have assigned ourselves of being the quarry for the world, and that that's how all of our jobs and prosperity is driven, might be coming to an end, is incredibly overdue, but incredibly welcome. And so for whatever reason that that's come out now, um I'm happy, I welcome it. More of that plays.
SPEAKER_00But is is are they just replacing it with a new capitalist industrial extractive framework? That's the consultant.
SPEAKER_04So let me just be optimistic. Yes, yes, they are.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's the pessimist spec.
SPEAKER_04Hi, Liz. Moving on to my last optimistic report. So the last one I wanted to mention, it's again not a legal development, but it does relate to the broader conversation we've been having today. And this is the Global Justice Report that was released on the 4th of June. So it comes from the World Inequality Lab, and it's authored by a number of very well-known economists like Thomas Piketty, Gabrielle Zuckman, and Lucas Chancel. And what they've done in this report is focus on the economics behind a new vision of a just and sustainable global future. So in the report, they've mapped out a transition pathway from now until 2100, or is it 2100? It's the same thing. With the aim of making it both economically and ecologically consistent, so that our pathway would actually talk to both of those things simultaneously. And really the central claim of this report is that reconciling planetary habitability with genuinely higher living standards for everyone on Earth is actually possible if three things happen simultaneously. So rapid decarbonisation, a major shift towards sufficiency. So shorter working hours, reduced material consumption, change consumption patterns, degrowth essentially, and a drastic reduction in income, wealth, and power inequality. So a drastic reduction in inequality both within and between countries. So to finance this shift, they propose a global justice fund, hence the name of the report, funded with a highly progressive global wealth tax, which would they they propose reaching up to 20% annually on billionaire level wealth. And now we have Elon the trillionaire. So can I just propose 100% on him? So I I really like these projects that take the project of building an alternative future seriously, hence why I thought this was relevant to today's episode. And they often involve really similar concepts, these ideas of degrowth, of reduced inequality, and a focus on care. And that we can actually all have really thriving existences with a lot less growth and accumulation as the focus if we bring it down to those things. So yes, I welcome that as well. More of that.
SPEAKER_00No pessimism, please. No, I think that's I I'm looking forward to taking a look at that. I think I saw some updates about it on LinkedIn. I think too, you know, if if we've if we're getting enhanced technology so it makes life easier for us, supposedly, thanks to the tech billionaires, then I do think we need to be having more conversations around things like universal basic income and other other models like that that can provide an adequate standard of living for people, as we're seeing, you know, different jobs maybe be disrupted as well. So this seems quite aligned with that too. I guess the risk there is if we're moving to a lot of these really intensive technologies, they have environmental impacts too.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and so it's uh it's around being really selective around what do we need? Like, do we need a whole bunch of non-consensual porn or like you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff being produced by AI, for example, which it is in no way conducive to a a life of well-being. Um and I think that goes into the the the less is more in a lot of ways, kind of uh conversations. And and for some people they th those might be hard choices, but on a on an overall system well-being, like everyone well-being kind of sense, they make a lot of it makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So how about you, Liz?
SPEAKER_00Do you have updates to share? Yeah, I've just got a couple too. It's been kind of quiet, which is always a little bit uh nerve-wracking for me, because usually I feel like when things get a bit quiet, the next day a bunch of announcements happen. And we are waiting with bated breath for quite a few different updates. So we're waiting for uh resource management reform to come back in our teatroa, conservation reform, and also the Naitaho water case that was in the High Court, which I spoke about on earlier episodes. We're still waiting for the judgment. The hearing was sort of uh February, March last year. So surely any day now that decision's gonna come out.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you would have thought.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. So a few further developments in relation to the story from our last podcast about climate tort litigation in Altiado, New Zealand. So the New Zealand government didn't like the way that a particular case on foot, which hadn't been heard yet, but was in in process in development, was, you know, presenting risks potentially for certain extractive industries. And so the government announced that they were going to be passing a legislative amendment, which meant that you could not bring any sort of tort action in relation to climate change in Aotearoa, New Zealand. A few other things have come to light since that happened. There was obviously a massive backlash. Interesting to me, too, that there hasn't been quite the level of backlash against the government's moves to override cases that were on foot and had already been heard in relation to Māori rights and interests in the fortress and seabed. But this one really raised the ire of a large cross-section of Al Taurua. And the Environmental Law Initiative, who we who we mentioned their cases quite a lot on the podcast, they've complained to the Ombudsman office about the government not being transparent enough in relation to its process in which it decided to intervene and stop this litigation that was on foot. So it's now come to light that FonTara and Z Energy, who were two of the respondents in the climate case, so a large dairy, big dairy uh organisation and also large petroleum organisation, had prepared a briefing in which they had said that this case, Mike Smith's case, was presenting risks to them and that they wanted to see uh a legislative solution in order to end the case. And that was provided to the Prime Minister's office, but not disclosed to um until the court ordered that that be disclosed. So Christopher Luxon, our Prime Minister, said that his office had no record of the document. But more and more detail keeps coming out about that. And so ER Live complained to the Ombudsman's office and asked for the Ombudsman to look in detail at this suggestion of potential withholding of information in this case. And I think it's it's opened up a lot of conversations about the ability for lobbying within our government and our terror and potential capture by certain industries. So I'm looking forward to seeing what happens. Now that it's on the Ombudsman's desk, uh that process is being done in a in a private and confidential nature. So it won't be until we hear if the Ombudsman's reporting on it what was found.
SPEAKER_04When I uh first started work as a solicitor, I worked in environment and planning. And I worked on a a planning matter where uh a local council and then two residents of a particular area of Sydney were challenging a particular development and we were representing the developers. And the the case went for a very, very long time in a landed environment court. There was a huge number of documents and evidence and expert witnesses and things. And eventually, I I think actually to our shock, we lost. And the the people opposing the development, that these two residents in particular, won the case, and the judgment was handed down, I want to say like 9 30, 10 a.m. By 4 p.m. that day, we had special legislation that went through Parliament approving the development anyway. And I mean I felt really shaken up. I felt really shaken up by that, like just that that the it it had nothing to do with the law in that kind of sense of how we frame the law, you know, that that this was just this was happening no matter what, and the whole thing all that, you know, that kind of veneer of justice became kind of irrelevant once we got back through through the special legislation. The same day that the judgment was handed down. Yeah, you know, it was particularly significant for me in in choosing to take a bit of a different career path. Because I I found that really full on. Yeah, but that this is the way things happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I saw that a lot when I was working in state government too in Australia, but we we see a lot of it now. And I think part of the problem is in countries like Altero and and Australia, we just don't have the strong constitutional safeguards that other nations have. Our courts are not strong. So the rule of law becomes a theoretical idea that doesn't necessarily Yeah, that that's right. And I think that more can hopefully be done. There have been some judicial challenges raised to some of these attempts recently as well at politicking around these issues, but it's part of the reason why I think we do need constitutional rights and we do need in treat provisions, because otherwise the tyranny of parliament, especially when you've got minority governments in place, is kind of a bit terrifying. Yeah. The next development in Aotearoa is another case in point. I mentioned earlier about um the government proposing disestablishing the Ministry for the Environment, and that went to Select Committee, and there were 588 written submissions, all but five were overtly opposed to the bill disestablishing the Ministry for the Environment. The Ministry for the Environment was specifically set up via legislation to be a voice for the environment in a time that was clearly much more progressive than now, like back in the, I think it was back in the 70s and 80s that that was done. But even when we have a situation where the public is letting Parliament know that it is very, very strongly opposed to a voice for the environment being disestablished, it just goes ahead anyway. So that legislation, the disestablishment of the Ministry for the Environment Amendment Act is going to come into force on the 1st of July. And, you know, what what can we do? We can't really do anything about it. So yeah, there was also a statistic that came out I saw in the newspaper last week in terms of how much this current government has spent on official information act requests, or, you know, what in Australia is called freedom of information or might be transparency kind of laws. The government's spending record levels on legal advice and technical advice to object to applications from the public to actually get access to how it's making its decisions. So whether any of these safeguards, the limited safeguards that we do have in Altiatua and Australia are working, it is, you know, really not clear to me at the moment. So, Christy, what are you working on? What have you got coming up on the horizon?
SPEAKER_04Well, July is kind of between semesters at in on this side of the world, down the bottom here. And so I've got a number of conferences. So there's the Australian Law Academics Association conference from the 1st to the 3rd of July. That's on at the University of Melbourne. Um, and I'm going to that. And then the Cassandra Centre for Human Rights at Monash Law has its annual conference on the 23rd of July. Uh, tickets are still on sale for those people who might be interested. It should be a really good event, and I'm going to that. And then on the 28th of July, Monash Law again is hosting a public lecture by Professor Ellen Stokes, who's from Bristol Law School. And her lecture asks, Is environmental law hopeful? which is perhaps proving your point, Liz, that this is the time the time of hope. But I'm really looking forward to it. And she's she's actually got an article out on this same topic, which is a really, really thoughtful article around some of these questions that we've been exploring today. So that's really interesting. And then at the end of July is when semester two starts. So teaching will kick off, and I need to be ready. So in amongst all of those things and all of the training and other things that it's going on in the background, I'm gonna be be pulling those units together. I have to admit that the work's actually been really fun and I've been really enjoying it. And a lot of it is comes down to the that won't fit and the kind of working through that point. But that's been my focus, that's going to be my focus, I guess, for the next sort of six weeks or so, and then probably my answer for the rest of the year will be teaching. But yeah, so that's what I've got coming up. How about you? What have you got coming up on the horizon?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm I'm listening into a court case at the moment, and so that's taking up a bit of my time, but very interesting just hearing a case play out in real time. I'm also gearing up to do some overseas travel in relation to some panel work that I'm doing. And then it's going to be school holidays, and we're supposed to be going on a ski trip with my family down south, but there's currently no snow. As I mentioned, it's been incredibly dry. And, you know, is this climate change? Is it this super al nine or whatever's going on? But there's really very little snow there. And I'm wondering if this rain that we've just had's made it up there, but it's just been so warm they haven't even really been able to make snow. So I don't know. I think we'll spend some time down south with family, but we might not get any skiing done. And maybe we won't be able to ski in the future. You know, maybe that's what's happening. Otherwise, working on multiple journal articles that are in various stages of the process and some grant applications, it always seems to be the way, even though the system seems pegged against anyone working on humanities and social sciences at the moment, and not at all. Um, and then yeah, just carrying on with engagement and field work for my fellowship. I also just wanted to raise with our listeners before we wrap up, given that the last episode, for example, was very popular with everyone, if there are any particular topics that our listeners would like to hear more about, either in the academic skills space or on substantive topics, let us know and we'll find someone to bring on and talk about it. So we would love to hear from you about the sorts of things that you might want us to spend some time talking about on the podcast.
SPEAKER_04Yes, absolutely. So before we wrap up, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who is listening and particularly for making it this far. As Liz mentioned, we had a pretty significant spike in downloads for our last episode. So that was interesting that it struck such a chord. Um, if you do enjoy the show, please do consider leaving us a review. You can leave it on Apple Podcasts, you can leave it on Spotify, or you can just send the link to a friend. Um, and you can get in touch with us privately. In the show notes, there's a send us a text button and that will come straight to us. But it is anonymous, so if you want us to know who you were, add your name or some other revealing detail.
SPEAKER_00And that's all from us. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Lore of the End of the World. You can find show notes from each episode at law at the end of the world at buzzsprout.com. And you can find both Christy and I on LinkedIn and also on Blue Sky. I'm there under the username at prof dashmac.bsky.social, and Christy is there under at Christyclark.bsky.social.
SPEAKER_04Thanks, Liz. Bye. Bye.
.png)
.png)