Stewarding the Earth

Rethinking Property & the Emergence of Biocultural Rights
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Description
The story of this book is the culmination of my journey to arrive at the place I started from and to know it for the first time. I started my journey in jurisprudence as a law student many years ago and later worked my way as a lawyer assisting indigenous and local communities to secure their rights to their territories. The notions of property I set out with after law school were turned on their head when I began working with communities who had a radically different relationship with their lands. I felt as if I was remembering something primal and half forgotten and entered, to use Eliot's phrase, through an unknown, remembered gate. Peoples, whom the law had seen as the last, showed me the way to that which was the beginning and paradoxically the future. This book is fundamentally about rethinking the jurisprudence around property and telling the story of stewardship as way of relating to the land. The book seeks to go back to the beginning and explore our cultural and spiritual relationships to land and the ways in which this informs our personhood and peoplehood. It relies on my own experience as a lawyer working with communities and governments and constructs its theoretical foundations on insights from economics, law, and anthropology.
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Contents
Introduction
1. Self-determination as Political Ecology: The Roots of Biocultural Rights
2. Homo Economicus on Trial: Towards an Ethic of Stewardship
3. Fighting Fetishism: Biocultural Readings of Social Hieroglyphs
4. Reification: The Law as a Collective Conspiracy
5. Fighting Reification: Towards a Peoples' History of the Law
6. Rethinking Property: A Biocultural Approach
7. A Jurisprudence of Stewardship: Creating Biocultural Precedents
8. Biocultural Rights in Anglo-American Jurisprudence
9. Biocultural Community Protocols: Towards a Pluralism of Property
Bibliography
Index
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Author Details
Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte has practised as an international environmental lawyer for several years, assisting communities to secure rights to their territories and heritage. He is the founder and former co-director of Natural Justice, an international organization of environmental lawyers providing legal assistance to indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Bavikatte was the legal advisor to the African Group of Countries through the negotiations towards the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). He has also provided legal advice to number of governments including those of South Africa, Namibia India, Bhutan, and the Federated States of Micronesia towards the development and implementation of community centred environmental law and policy. He has published extensively on environmental law and was awarded the Shuttleworth Fellowship in 2011 for his work on Biocultural Community Protocols.