Beyond anthropocentrism and ecocentrism

This chapter explores the competing narratives and the way they affect the articulations of the ‘ecosystem approach’ in some detail, and it has emerged that they map with the binary anthropocentrism/ecocentrism. The primary semantic reference of anthropocentrism is man understood as a symbolic placeholder for humanity. The central aim of problematizing ecocentrism is to prepare the terrain for a biopolitical critique of the ‘ecosystem approach’, a critique that will be equally aimed at anthropocentric and ecocentric articulations of the concept. The concept of anthropocentrism, and the narrative associated with it and with the emerging frame of the Anthropocene, conceals very specific mechanics of exclusion and of power relations through which both other humans and ecosystems are ‘systematically disadvantaged’ by legal modernity. Another problematic aspect of ecocentrism, according to the literature, relates to pragmatic considerations. The problematic risk that affects any version of ecocentrism is that the idea of nature often remains unproblematized in ecocentric articulations of law.