The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Restorative Justice

721 Pages·2022·14.085 MB·English

by  Brunilda Pali, Miranda Forsyth, Felicity Tepper

The Palgrave Handbook
of Environmental
Restorative Justice
Edited by
Brunilda Pali · Miranda Forsyth
Felicity Tepper
The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental
Restorative Justice
“At this crucial, and terrifying, time in Earth’s trajectory, when human/non-
human action engagements have been, and are, so consequential, and when the
prospect of a sixth mass extinction looms larger every day, this volume, with its
wealth of thoughtful and telling insights drawn from restorative justice, charts
possibilities for planetary restoration. It does so at a moment when nothing is
more important, and more urgent, than collective action that will reconstitute
our planetary engagements. This volume constitutes an urgent call for action by
criminologists, to do what everyone of us living today must do—namely, con-
tribute, urgently and with all our might to realizing the possibility of a liveable
tomorrow.”
—Clifford Shearing, Professor of Law, Universities of Cape Town, Griffith,
Montreal, and New South Wales, Australia
“You may think ‘restorative justice’ sounds abstract, utopian, narrow—if so, you
are wrong. This truly engaging and wide-ranging collection of essays covers the
theory, philosophy and application of restorative justice. Insights and analysis
range across the past and the future, case-studies from around the world, and
ideas of trusteeship, remedy and repair. It is the definitive guide.”
—Nigel South, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Essex, UK
“In the face of an unprecedented global environmental crisis that is eroding the
very foundations of life on Earth, it is clear that we need new ideas, creative solu-
tions, and a profound rethinking of the relationship between humans and the
rest of nature. This handbook delivers a thought-provoking smorgasbord of
innovative proposals that collectively have the potential to spark rapid, systemic
and transformative changes in society.”
—Dr. David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the
Environment
“The IPCC tells us that we have only three years left to limit climate change and
ensure a ‘liveable future’. IBPES tells us that we have entered a sixth mass extinc-
tion. It is important to do everything possible to force industrial activity to
respect the Earth system, with the recognition of the crime of ecocide being the
most universal legal solution, but it is also clear that we must move quickly
towards a society capable of adapting to the new living conditions that await us.
This path is that of resilience, and resilience cannot be achieved without
Environmental Restorative Justice and without transitional justice that recog-
nises the status of victims for populations depending on them for survival, in
particular Indigenous people, future generations, and non-human beings. This
book is therefore fundamental because it gives us the tools to design tomorrow’s
world with ecosystemic new rules, and beyond that to reintegrate the Earth
community.”
—Valerie Cabanes, member of the Independent Expert Panel
for the Legal Definition of Ecocide
Brunilda Pali • Miranda Forsyth
Felicity Tepper
Editors
The Palgrave
Handbook of
Environmental
Restorative Justice
Editors
Brunilda Pali Miranda Forsyth
Department of Social and Cultural RegNet School of Regulation and Global
Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences Governance
KU Leuven Australian National University
Leuven, Belgium Canberra, ACT, Australia
Felicity Tepper
RegNet School of Regulation and Global
Governance
Australian National University
Canberra, ACT, Australia
ISBN 978-3-031-04222-5 ISBN 978-3-031-04223-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04223-2
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Foreword
‘But how do you apologise to a river?’ Eliza Victoria asks as Chap. 19
opens (by Jennifer Amparo, Ana Bibal, Deborah Cleland, Ma. Catriona
Devanadera, Aaron Lecciones, Maria Mendoza, and Emerson Sanchez).
If we tread on our dog’s foot, we apologise, give her a cuddle. A river,
however, is neither a single animal nor an object. Chapters of this book
discuss how Indigenous wisdom instructs us that a river is a flow of life,
life of diverse forms, that adapts its life flows to seasons, flood, and
drought. If we seek a closer approach to a capability for saying sorry to
rivers, first embrace and empower Indigenous voices of river custodians
into restorative dialogue. Not any Indigenous voice, of course, but a cus-
todian of that particular river who feels that river as part of herself, her
ancestors as part of it. The spirit of the river thence flows into her spirit
as a custodian of that particular river. Inviting the apt elders into a circle
is a way to make a conversation about protection of the environmental
heritage of that flow of life more spiritually profound.
White settlers on Indigenous lands are not excluded from spiritual
engagement with Country and rivers. Personal experience is that my spir-
itual engagement with nature is shallow compared to Indigenous leaders
who mentor me on this question. I listened to them when they said that
I can become a less spiritually shallow white man within healing and
yarning circles by taking my mind to that patch of nature for which I
have special affection. It is love for a particular spot that I share with an
v
vi Foreword
old Aboriginal friend on Yuin country. Near where he and I live stands a
particular spotted gum tree, wounded by big winds centuries ago, still
strong and wide. I confess to being a white bourgeois tree hugger with
that tree. Most days, rather than hug, I gently pat it or whisper hello. I say
daily hellos too with two particular sea eagles who nest nearby and a
cockatoo who disrupts my writing with noisy speech from our verandah
railing. In a Bougainville village where I lived for a while in 1969, I was
made an honorary chief of the Naboin (eagle) clan in 2006. The elders
told me I must care for my special relationship with eagles; I must never
shoot one just because I am hungry in the way they said white men do. I
feel that connection to the Naboin clan’s part of nature’s whole when I
look up to admire our soaring Malua Bay eagles.
A famous episode in the history of peacebuilding occurred in 1992
between current South African President Cyril Ramaphosa and former
National Party Defence Minister Roelf Meyer. I interviewed Meyer about
the spiritual participation of nature in this encounter. During 1992, the
peace negotiations and the personal relationship between President de
Klerk and African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela had soured.
Violence was escalating. Mandela and de Klerk understood that Meyer
and Ramaphosa had negotiated constructively over the National Union
of Mineworkers’ strike when Ramaphosa was the union secretary. So, de
Klerk and Mandela agreed to step back and see if they could craft a new
formula for a constitutional settlement. They did; it paved a path to a
powersharing transition followed by the election of Mandela. The two
men went trout fishing together. The serenity of nature helped soften
their hearts as they settled a riverbank reconciliation. Then the river bit
back. Meyer spiked a hook into his hand in the manner intended for the
trout. Ramaphosa administered a stiff whisky to dull Meyer’s pain and
then firmly extracted the embedded hook. That was just one of the things
that happened to strengthen their relationship as they negotiated amongst
the trees. I suspect, but do not know for a fact, that Meyer may have
betrayed his white constituency in some ways. Meyer and Ramaphosa
were the experts on mining who had the ear of their two leaders. The day
he was released from prison, Mandela announced an early priority to
Foreword vii
nationalise mining companies. He recanted upon realising that his policy
of requiring these firms to clean up the environmental mess they had
created would mean that many mines that were almost mined out would
have assets less than their environmental liabilities. So Mandela turned
against the policy of socialising capitalism’s environmental losses to the
benefit of white owners and western investors. What seemed a peacemak-
ing concession to white business power was actually smart environmental
custodianship.
Negotiating armed conflicts amongst the trees is smart peacemaking.
It is not just Indigenous wisdom that teaches how trees soften hearts.
Western science likewise shows that when people live in communities
with a lot of trees, this soothes anxiety and anger. Planting great numbers
of urban trees simultaneously improves urban environments, sucks car-
bon, and reduces urban crime. These are now quite well-established find-
ings. Without western science to support it, Australians also understand
how the soft beauty of the desert ecosystem spoke peacefully into one of
our country’s great literary and political communions with the ancestors,
the Uluru Statement from the Heart.1
It is surprising how often conservative, warlike men choose to negoti-
ate peace close to nature. In the Middle East conflicts from the 1970s, we
saw this with bitter enemies meeting amongst the trees of the US
Presidential retreat at Camp David and on other occasions amongst trees
near places like Oslo. Long before this, Camp David was used for sum-
mits by presidents of World War II fame, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, who
held summits there with the likes of Churchill and Khrushchev. Vladimir
Putin is one of many Russian leaders who have been hosted there.
President Reagan restored the nature trails of Camp David that President
Nixon had paved over. It was here that Reagan discussed global leader-
ship for the Montreal Protocol on healing the ozone hole. Reagan also
held the most important of the peacemaking summits ever held with the
Soviet Union in Iceland close to nature, with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Presidents of these great powers who still carry codes to ignite the nuclear
1 Please do watch the video and listen to the Uluru Statement from the Heart here: https://ulurus-
tatement.org/the-statement/ (last accessed 6 February 2022).
viii Foreword
conflagrations that would destroy most species of the planet through
nuclear winter and famine do well to talk amongst the very trees that
would be destroyed by failure in their peacemaking.
In the Peacebuilding Compared project,2 a 25-year project designed to
follow all the major armed conflicts around the world until 2030, with
the aim of understanding key ingredients that make for the success of
sustainable peacebuilding, we have tried to allow nature to speak to little
peace processes we attempted to facilitate amongst the trees, for example,
between one spoiler faction of the Bougainville peace, the President and
the next President of Bougainville and the Minister for Bougainville
Affairs in 2008, listening to many ordinary women and men from affected
communities.
This handbook takes us to journeys of healing between so many kinds
of environmental destroyers and healers. It is an inspiring book, bril-
liantly curated by the editors. Some authors are an established cream of
green criminology and environmental restorative justice. Others are
evocative new voices putting up fresh green shoots of ideas about how to
mediate cries from nature and proffer remorse to rivers. They gift us read-
ers with a rich blend of theory and green restorative practice. This reaches
far beyond the practice of set piece restorative justice conferences. It is
art, theatre, film, poetry, healing rituals of everyday life, restorative juris-
prudence, intergenerational and United Nations justice in ecosystem
restoration, green decolonisation, environmental learning, restorative
regulation, green markets, and green democratic innovation. Other
authors simply help us understand the difference between everyday
speech acts amongst earthlings that are less and more infused with kind-
ness and healing. Other chapters still help us see that environmental
restorative justice must embody a robust politics of resistance to ecocide.
We might read all chapters as helping to displace a hegemonic order
based on domination of nature with one grounded at least in an alterna-
tive hegemonic order that is greener, more restorative, more just in its
regulation of human dominations of nature.
2 Peacebuilding Compared is a collective and long-term research project funded by the the
Australian Research Council since 2004. For more information on the project visit: http://john-
braithwaite.com/peacebuilding/ (last accessed 6 February 2022).
Foreword ix
A really simple way this book inspires is that it reveals the richness and
sheer level of engagement of so many fine scholars with environmental
restorative justice as a field. This when it barely existed as a field of
scholarship a few years ago. Long may it grow from germinal seeds
planted in this beautiful book.
Canberra, ACT, Australia John Braithwaite