A Case for a Global Ecological Regime: How to Foster Resonance on a Planetary Scale

The need for sustainability should be understood as the motivation of Ellis’ (2020) insight on the need of a global ecological law. This new branch of law would also entail a new way of articulation the notion of subjects of law. Drawing from the brief Latour’s (2014r) reformulation on the concept of natural law and the law of the nations, Ellis (2020) argues for a new law system focused on stabilizing expectations on how to save humanity from itself. The concept of Anthropocene unveiled the collective capacity of the humanity to change our planet in a geological scale: the planetary systems were not independent of the human actions, but our capacity to change the Earth would be pivotal on dictating how the planet would keep evolving. So, instead of a natural law that is transcendent to humanity and that could be only unveiled by specific prophets, law should be understood as a set of rules focused on ensuring our collective survival against the world that we are creating for ourselves. Sustainability, then, could be understood as a cognitive device to measure how our actions are impacting the planet, specifically if they are contributing to ensure our collective survival. That means that a global ecological law can be devised as a means of coordinating and synchronizing the actions of organizations towards our collective safety. This law would operate through a system based on science and law, creating a regime following Teubners concepts. The code sustainable/unsustainable would ensure a stronger resonance (Luhmann, 1986) between society and its physical environment. That should happen through the cognitive dispositions of science, that would select the communications about the physical environment, and of law, that would then process that information in terms of its relevance to a governance system of rules on global ecology.