How should laws and policies with respect to offshore wind energy be reformed to preserve the resilience of ecosystems? Defining our relationship with the environment, where the man-made structures of offshore wind energy are constructed, is the starting point to answer this question.
Maintaining the current anthropocentric regulatory system keeps human beings in the centre of life, taking benefit from nature and its resources. We have established a property relationship with the environment as an object. We tend to take an economic, self-interested, perspective towards the environment and its resources. Freedom to use those resources is embedded in this relationship with nature, and our regulations are a part of this view. Ownership rights and economic benefits tend to shape the way we define justice, rights, laws, and policies. Our approach to environmental protection is based on this way of understanding our world. Environmental laws have promoted mitigation of environmental effects and the polluter pays principle. Protection and preservation of the environment are utilitarian concepts to protect our interests.
This anthropocentric perception has produced regulatory systems which have not effectively prevented the degradation of the environment. Laws and policies under a human-centred view have contributed to the exertion of heavy pressure on the environment, climate change, biodiversity loss, and harms to the integrity of ecosystems. Legal systems have not properly aligned with the ecological sciences that consider the dynamic, non-linear, and complex nature of ecosystems as well as the connections between the components of ecosystems. Laws promoting economic measurement of the environment might hinder assessing the environmental benefits and consequences of human pressure on ecosystems. Those parts of the environment in which human beings have limited interest may be ignored in economic assessments. In such ineffective legal responses to human-induced changes, the environment cannot be heard because it cannot represent and speak for itself. It is up to regulatory systems to empower the environment by strong legal forms.
Ecological sustainability should be adopted as a pillar of sustainable development to drive change and guide the regulatory framework for the development of offshore wind energy. Ecological sustainability recognizes the intrinsic value of nature and places ecological understanding in the centre. The environment and natural resources are held in trust for human beings and should be preserved for future generations or, perhaps with a bigger shift, the environment is not an object to be owned and exploited inappropriately, but a subject to have rights. The focus of laws departs from an ownership relationship by human beings to ecology, which recognizes the environment and its ecological integrity without political and legal boundaries. Admittedly, this departure is difficult, like any other change. The fundamental point is that we should begin to consider whether the rule of law protects ecological goals. This consideration should become our new normal for determining the validity of laws. Using this lens to examine laws and policies urges us to stop drifting along with an anthropocentric framework for offshore wind energy and helps us drive ecologically sustainable changes. Watch for my next blog post to read about the likely ecological and environmental impacts of offshore wind projects.
Photo by Nicholas Doherty on Unsplash
