Book Launch: Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes Amazon: The Lawness of life by Dr. Ivan Dario Vargas-Roncancio
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Join us on Friday, November 8th, 2024, from 12:00 - 2:00 pm in ES 1042 (5 Bancroft Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 3J1) for Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes Amazon: The Lawness of life's Book Launch! Hear from author Dr. Ivan Dario Vargas-Roncancio, an Assistant Professor at York University in the Law and Society Program.
Book Abstract
Earth systems are undergoing fundamental changes with increasing pressure and demand on ‘natural resources’ and ‘ecosystem services’ for human societies. Dominant environmental law regimes cannot prevent and remedy ecological degradation and cultural loss thus allowing for new forms of injustice. Indigenous legalities are at the core of a crucial paradigm shift: from piecemeal environmental law and governance to a decolonial jurisprudence of the Earth.
Based on ethnographic and participatory fieldwork across Inga ancestral territories of Southern Colombia; studies in plant sensing and intelligence, and inter-epistemic alliances leading to the creation of the Indigenous Biocultural University of Amazonia, this talk probes how living territories can serve as a prototype of legal analysis and practice modelled after socio-ecological relationalities.
A contribution to what Inga leaders I work with conceptualize as ‘epistemic justice’, Indigenous legalities are based on the recognition of the sentient and cognitive affordances of the territory as the basis of climate governance. I consider this a crucial step towards a broader paradigm shift in the law: a shift that reckons with the limits and possibilities of environmental law, on the one hand, and the rights of nature, on the other, to face the multi-scalar impacts of climate change on Earth’s life-supporting systems and Indigenous livelihoods.
Speaker Bio
ván is an Assistant Professor in the Law & Society program at York University; Ph.D in Natural Resource Sciences from McGill University; former Associate Director at the Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives (CICADA) and postdoc with the Leadership for the Ecozoic (L4E) program at McGill (2021 – 2023). Co-PI: “A Community Path to Higher Education: The Biocultural Indigenous University of the Inga People of Colombia” (Spencer Foundation grant). His research focuses on Earth law and the rights of nature; Indigenous legal cosmologies in Amazonia; anthropology of plant-human relations, and critical pedagogies. Latest work: Posthuman Legalities: New Materialism and Law Beyond the Human (co-ed.), Cheltenham: Elgar, 2021; Law, Humans and Plants in the Andes-Amazon: The Lawness of Life. NY: Routledge (Law, Justice, and Ecology book series), 2024; and Pedagogies for the Ecozoic (co-author), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.
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