As wildfires, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, and climate change increasingly impact upon ecosystems and human livelihoods around the world,Footnote ¹ a growing number of scholars are emphasizing the importance of hope. Hope can mitigate the paralysis of helplessness and catalyze ambitious efforts towards sustainability.Footnote ² Charting Environmental Law Futures in the Anthropocene, edited by Michelle Lim, carves out its place in that context, as an ambitious and forward-facing contribution to environmental law scholarship. The book presents a diverse series of case studies and conceptual analyses. In doing so, it proposes a roadmap for improving the capacity of environmental laws to promote desirable futures in a period of unprecedented global change.

The overall approach of the book is refreshing. Rather than cataloguing the multiple failings of environmental law, the book adopts an approach known as ‘futures thinking’ (p. 11), highlighting the types of action and approach that will be necessary to achieve a more positive iteration of the future from among the wide variety of futures that are possible. The book articulates this approach as the search for a ‘Good Anthropocene’ (p. 11). The Anthropocene is an emerging geological epoch in which Earth's conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human beings, and which is characterized by abrupt, rapid, and large-scale environmental change.Footnote ³ While some scholars contest the possibility that the Anthropocene could be ‘good’,Footnote ⁴ this book takes a practical rather than a philosophical perspective, noting that ‘if our species has been able to affect such significant change in the Earth System then we also have the power to create an alternative destiny for ourselves and those who will inherit the Earth’ (p. 12).

From that ambitious starting point, the opening chapter articulates an array of goals for the book, which include exploring the role of law in the Anthropocene; providing a framework within which to rethink humans’ relationship with the planet; introducing hope, optimism, and novel solutions to environmental law scholarship about the Anthropocene; and setting both a research and action agenda for the future of environmental law. The overarching question that draws these multiple goals together is: ‘How can law facilitate equitable futures on planet Earth within a safe operating space for humanity?’ (p. 2).

The book is made up of 19 chapters in four substantive parts, with the introductory chapter providing an overview of the book's goals, core themes, and methodology. Rather than examine each chapter in detail, this review considers the structure and broad propositions underpinning each part and the extent to which the various contributions cohere to meet the overarching goals of the book.

Part I is made up of five chapters on the topic of redefining human-nature relationships, because a ‘Good Anthropocene requires a radical departure’ from the current human-nature dichotomy (p. 12). Part I demonstrates the value of existing legal efforts, such as China's ‘ecological civilization’ policy (Ch. 3), while advocating reform of laws that justify human domination and the exploitation of natural systems. An Cliquet's Chapter 5 provides a compelling path forward using ‘ecological law’, which requires humans to take responsibility for ecosystems rather than dominate them. Aside from this chapter, Part I risks replicating an anthropocentrism that is a concern for some scholars,Footnote ⁵ with most chapters placing human wellbeing at the centre of environmental law futures. However, the book's final chapter clarifies the editor's intention that equitable and sustainable futures should benefit humans (present and future) and non-human nature. If read with this holistic approach in mind, the chapters in Part I deliver an impressively nuanced contribution to scholarship about human-nature dichotomies in law.

Part II, which spans six chapters, is titled ‘Planetary Order and International Collaboration’ (p. 14). The decision to emphasize the international focus of this part feels both somewhat imbalanced, because there is no equivalent section dedicated to domestic legal frameworks,Footnote ⁶ and somewhat inaccurate, because this part is introduced not in terms of its focus on international instruments and institutions, but instead foregrounds collaboration between and within countries and across legal regimes in a way that could be more accurately described as transnational. This thematic justification feels stretched at times, as the chapters in Part II do not coalesce neatly around any of the book's broad conceptual or theoretical bases, such as equitable sustainability, systems thinking or particular ‘futures’ in the Anthropocene. However, this critique should not undermine the value, novelty, and excellent contribution that each chapter in this part makes to the book as a whole. The first three chapters address issues of planetary boundaries with Stephen Minas's authoritative analysis of the climate-ocean nexus (Chapter 7), a proposal for forests as a ‘common concern of humankind’ (Chapter 8), and an exploration of international freshwater laws as a foundation for holistic transboundary water management in the water-scarce futures of the Anthropocene (Chapter 9). The remaining chapters present case studies on China's role in Antarctica (Chapter 10), a proposed new International Environment Court (Chapter 11), and transparency for good international environmental governance (Chapter 12). While the ‘planetary order’ component of the title of this part feels unnecessarily militaristic, the concept of ‘collaboration’ fits far more comfortably with each of the analyses in Part II, demonstrating the crucial importance of reaching across political, ecological, and legal boundaries to improve environmental outcomes in the Anthropocene.

Part III takes what is described as a ‘practical turn’ (p. 3), with six chapters about implementation. This part considers appropriate actors (such as Indigenous perspectives (Chapter 13) and charter cities (Chapter 16)) and legal instruments for framing litigation and remedies (such as non-constitutional remedies in the Indian Supreme Court (Chapter 14) and instruments for attributing liability for environmental harm (Chapter 15)). The final two chapters in Part III highlight the complexity of responding to wicked environmental challengesFootnote ⁷ through local legal frameworks, and the need for new legal and non-legal perspectives to tackle them (such as municipal waste in India (Chapter 17) and South African planning law (Chapter 18)). The chapters in Part III demonstrate opportunities for new ways of thinking about, implementing, and adapting environmental laws in increasingly challenging environmental and climatic contexts.

Part IV contains a single chapter in which the editor presents five ‘research and action priorities’ (RAPs), drawing on academic literature and a synthesis of recommendations from across the book. The RAPs incorporate mainstream recommendations such as coordinating environmental laws across scales and sectors; and more radical proposals for rethinking neoliberalism in environmental law and engaging new actors, including future generations, natural systems, and cities. The RAPs also range widely in their specificity. For example, priorities include vague proposals for ‘harnessing the role of law’ by developing principles, instruments, and rights-based approaches (p. 231), and more specific recommendations such as translating ‘environmental restoration science and cultural harm into [justiciable] claims for damages’ (p. 229). Overall, these RAPs outline a detailed and comprehensive agenda for future scholarship and environmental law reform. In doing so, they draw together and build upon an emerging body of scholarship calling for a new generation of environmental laws.

Two core themes underpin the book's substantive contributions. The first is ‘sustainable futures’ (pp. 54–6), which combines futures thinking with sustainability – an explicit goal in many existing international and domestic environmental laws. Fabiano de Andrade Correa and Marina Demaria Venâncio address this theme directly in Chapter 4, analyzing the concept of sustainable development in international law. However, the authors elect not to engage with critiques of the concept of sustainability itself, including its failure to arrest ongoing environmental decline and its potential to be actively unhelpful in responding to rapid and large-scale anthropogenic climate change.Footnote ⁸ While issues of sustainability arise elsewhere in the book, the sustainable futures theme does not ‘cover the field’ on this complex and important issue. Nonetheless, scholars with an interest in sustainability narratives will be better equipped, as a result of this book, to interrogate the capacity of sustainability to catalyze legal reform and improve human and environmental outcomes in the upheaval of the Anthropocene.

The second core theme of the book is equity. The book's authors make a variety of nuanced and insightful contributions on this point, highlighting the crucial foundation of procedural- and rights-based approaches for equitable sustainability in the Anthropocene. In Chapter 15, Jacob Phelps and co-authors directly tackle inequitable experiences of global environmental change, emphasizing that environmental harm in the Anthropocene will continue to ‘disproportionately affect marginalised communities, future generations and natural systems’ (p. 172). Of particular note is Jonathan Liljeblad's thoughtful contribution on Indigenous perspectives and the human rights implications of environmental harm (Chapter 13), which epitomizes the mutually reinforcing nature of sustainability and equity.

While the book covers an extraordinary amount of ground in its substantive chapters, there are some notable weaknesses. Firstly, the inclusivity and breadth of its goals are laudable, but synthesizing such diverse goals in a coherent way was always going to be a challenge. The introductory chapter goes some way in meeting this challenge by explaining the book's core themes and theoretical and methodological framing. The thorough and well-structured concluding chapter is even more helpful in this regard. However, a more systematic overview of the book's contributions in the introduction would have been useful in explaining how the variety of jurisdictions, voices, sectors, and governance scales create a coherent foundation for the RAPs.

Secondly, the book achieves only part of the editor's goal of creating a dialogue between the authors of the chapters in this collection. The editor highlights the importance of facilitating dialogue between diverse voices and legal contexts and, to her credit, has sought to achieve this by including contributors who are typically under-represented in collections like this. The final chapter does a particularly admirable job of drawing together diverse voices. However, tantalizing, yet untapped, opportunities remain to draw new lessons from interesting intersections between the chapters. For example, if cities and regions are, as Benjamen Franklen Gussen argues in Chapter 16, an ideal scale for promoting sustainability in the Anthropocene, then land-use planning laws, such as those described in Chapter 18 by Angela van der Berg, are surely the closest legal example we have for achieving this recommendation? This and other intersections in the contributions in this book remain worthy of further attention and may yet reveal rich new lessons for improving the responsiveness and adaptability of environmental laws.

In seeking to achieve so many diverse and ambitious goals, the editor faced a challenging task in drawing its chapters together into a cohesive collection. As such, the volume is an exceptional achievement. It showcases novel ideas, detailed analyses, and thoughtful reflections on a more hopeful future. It also emphasizes the importance of elevating the voices of ‘the lawyers of the Anthropocene’ (p. 2) – a striking future epithet for a generation of legal scholars and practitioners facing extraordinary intellectual, practical, and disciplinary upheaval. I recommend this book for the breadth of its coverage and the next step that it represents in the ongoing push to reform and reinvigorate environmental law, and to propel it into an uncertain future. We must not miss any opportunity to progress towards more desirable futures as we plough headlong into the upheaval of the Anthropocene.