About

Welcome to Justice, Ecology, Law & Place (JELP)!

Justice, Ecology, Law & Place is the renewed publication venue for a community of scholars and practitioners that once published in the Journal of Environmental Law & Practice. It is a sort-of “JELP 2.0”; that is, a place to find scholarly work at the intersections of Justice, Ecology, Law & Place. Thus, while the name change is intended to signal a rejection of the colonial constraints of “environmental law,” as it has been conventionally conceived and to set us off on a new course, maintaining the acronym is our way of signalling that we wish to maintain — and expand — our community. Many of us in this community have engaged in the critique of “environmental law” for many years, for several reasons: its fundamental assumptions, which rest on the separation between humans and environments; its faith in “assimilative capacity” and identifiable “thresholds”; its privileging of Western science over other ways of knowing, especially Indigenous knowledges; its wilfully blind acceptance of the jurisdiction of the settler state over Indigenous lands and waters; and many more shortcomings that do not reflect our orientation to healthy communities, ecosystems, and relations. Ecology, despite also being a scientific field derived from Western science, embraces interconnections and systems-health over discrete, individual components of an “environment.” It understands variability across bio-regions and territories, and it influences the operation of place-based legal orders. By qualifying ecology and law with justice and place, we are centering the local outcomes and impacts of multiple, even transnational legal orders and explicitly locating socio-ecological systems in our consideration of the environment. Ultimately, the new elements of the JELP name emphasize complex relationships between people, places, and legal orders.

Instead of presenting a “Canadian” journal of … we wish to signal that legal orders arise from relationships to land. These defy containment and instead require intersocietal and transnational alliances and relationships that give shape and meaning to the exercise of authority and jurisdiction on the ground, in specific places. Importantly, a focus on the specificity of place can also challenge and confound cemented ideas about sovereignty, authority, ownership, and jurisdiction that plague environmental law. We aim to bring scholars into conversation with one another in order to share expertise and illuminate distinctions and comparisons transnationally and across bio-regions. At the same time, we wish to maintain our community of scholars rooted here and to welcome those that engage with this place from elsewhere.

Instead of continuing to uphold the conventions and assumptions of environmental law as it has been known, we are now interested in exploring, as a community, questions of justice and equality as they emerge out of the urgent and confounding crises that confront us: the climate emergency, ecological collapse, Indigenous resurgence, and racial justice. We must grapple with the seeming inability of law to remedy or even mitigate climate change, environmental harm, biodiversity loss, and the continuing dispossession of Indigenous Peoples. We welcome contributions from those that are seeking to fundamentally transform existing legal systems and generate new alternative legal principles, practices, and concepts in pursuit of more just futures. We also welcome contributions from those who wish to challenge and debate the need to move on wholesale from existing systems, or who wish to make arguments for maintaining certain of those elements.