Environmental laws are laws that protect the environment. Environmental law is the collection of laws, regulations, agreements and common law that governs how humans interact with their environment. This includes environmental regulations; laws governing management of natural resources, such as forests, minerals, or fisheries; and related topics such as environmental impact assessments. Environmental law is seen as the body of laws concerned with the protection of living things from the harm that human activity may immediately or eventually cause to them or their species, either directly or to the media and the habits on which they depend.
This is an index of conservation topics. It is an alphabetical index of articles relating to conservation biology and conservation of the natural environment.
Wilderness or wildlands are natural environments on Earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity, or any nonurbanized land not under extensive agricultural cultivation. The term has traditionally referred to terrestrial environments, though growing attention is being placed on marine wilderness. Recent maps of wilderness suggest it covers roughly one-quarter of Earth's terrestrial surface, but is being rapidly degraded by human activity. Even less wilderness remains in the ocean, with only 13.2% free from intense human activity.
The Earth Charter is an international declaration of fundamental values and principles considered useful by its supporters for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. Created by a global consultation process, and endorsed by organizations representing millions of people, the Charter "seeks to inspire in all peoples a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family, the greater community of life, and future generations." It calls upon humanity to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history. The Earth Charter's ethical vision proposes that environmental protection, human rights, equitable human development, and peace are interdependent and indivisible. The Charter attempts to provide a new framework for thinking about and addressing these issues. The Earth Charter Initiative organization exists to promote the Charter.
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests, and also among dozens of other indigenous groups in Colombia in the Caribbean Coast, as well as others living in the Pacific Coast, Llanos Orientales, and in the Andean and inter-Andean regions (Muisca) as well as in other areas of Colombia, and he also did research on campesino societies. For nearly six decades he advanced ethnographic and anthropological studies, as well as archeological research, and as a scholar was a prolific writer and public figure renowned as a staunch defender of indigenous peoples. Reichel-Dolmatoff has worked with other archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Ana María Groot, Gonzalo Correal Urrego and others. He died 17 May 1994 in Colombia.
Environmentalism or environmental rights is a broad philosophy, ideology, and social movement about supporting life, habitats, and surroundings. While environmentalism focuses more on the environmental and nature-related aspects of green ideology and politics, ecologism combines the ideology of social ecology and environmentalism. Ecologism is more commonly used in continental European languages, while environmentalism is more commonly used in English but the words have slightly different connotations.
Thomas Berry, CP was a Catholic priest, cultural historian, and scholar of the world's religions, especially Asian traditions. Later, as he studied Earth history and evolution, he called himself a "geologian".
Ecospirituality connects the science of ecology with spirituality. It brings together religion and environmental activism. Ecospirituality has been defined as "a manifestation of the spiritual connection between human beings and the environment." The new millennium and the modern ecological crisis has created a need for environmentally based religion and spirituality. Ecospirituality is understood by some practitioners and scholars as one result of people wanting to free themselves from a consumeristic and materialistic society. Ecospirituality has been critiqued for being an umbrella term for concepts such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, and nature religion.
The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm, Sweden, during June 5–16, 1972.
Wild law are the human laws which are consistent with Earth jurisprudence. A wild law regulates human behavior that privileges maintaining the integrity and functioning of the whole Earth community in the long term over the interests of any species at a particular time.
Cormac Cullinan is a practising environmental attorney and author based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is a director of the leading South African environmental law firm, Cullinan & Associates Inc, and director of the Wild Law Institute, a non-profit organisation that advocates for Rights of Nature. A former commercial lawyer, he has practiced, taught and written about environmental law and policy since 1992, and has worked in more than 20 countries.
Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice is a book by Cormac Cullinan that proposes recognizing natural communities and ecosystems as legal persons with legal rights. The book explains the concept of wild law, that is, human laws that are consistent with earth jurisprudence. Foreworded by Thomas Berry, the book was published by Green Books in November 2003 in association with The Gaia Foundation, London. It was first published in South Africa, the author's home country, in August 2002 by Siber Ink.
The Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA) is a non-profit international environmental law organization founded in 1996 by a collaboration of five environmental organizations in the Americas including Earthjustice.
Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy that promotes the inherent worth of all living beings regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs, and the restructuring of modern human societies in accordance with such ideas.
Ukraine Nature Conservation Society(Ukrpryroda – Ukrayinske tovarystvo okhorony pryrody) is a non-governmental environmental organization, foundation of which was one of precursors of the Khrushchev thaw during his time in Ukraine.
Vance G. Martin is an agent in international nature conservation and wilderness protection, and a writer. Martin specializes in bridging the interests of people and nature through culture, communications, science, and policy. He has worked and lived in many countries, 75 or more, and served on the boards of numerous conservation and business organizations. He founded, and from 1984 through 2022, served as President of the WILD Foundation, an international conservation organization explicitly dedicated to protecting wilderness, connecting wild nature to people, and to communicating the values of wilderness and its benefits for human communities. He currently works through Wilderness Foundation Global, an international alliance based in the Global South that he co-founded in 2016. He is based in Boulder, Colorado (USA).
Rights of nature or Earth rights is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges twentieth-century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as "resource" to be owned, used, and degraded. Proponents argue that laws grounded in rights of nature direct humanity to act appropriately and in a way consistent with modern, system-based science, which demonstrates that humans and the natural world are fundamentally interconnected.
Rights of nature law is the codification and other implementations of the legal and jurisprudential theory of the rights of nature. This legal school of thought describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights.
Earth law is an emerging legal framework that seeks to advance the legal rights of the Earth in international law. Earth lawyers consider earth law to be a different form of legal practice from environmental law on the basis of ecocentrism, rather than anthropocentrism. Earth law seeks to codify protections for the environment not just for human health or desires but for the earth itself. It includes all types of lawyering which establish rights or protections for the interest of nature, rather than the interest of humans.
