Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community
- Book: The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community by Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei.
URL =
Description
"The most important structural solution to the rush toward final disorder is to restore some harmony between human laws and the laws of nature by giving law back to networks of communities. If the people were to understand the nature of law as an evolving common, reflecting local conditions and fundamental needs, they would care about it. People would understand that the law is too important to remain in the hands of organized corporate interests. We are the makers and users of the law.
An ecological understanding of law, the only revolution possible through culture and genuine civic engagement, overcomes both hierarchy and competition as “correct” narratives of the legal order. It seeks to capture the complex relationships among the parts and the whole—between individual entitlements, duties, rights, power, and the law—by using the metaphor of the network and of the open community sharing a purpose.
Instead of being alienated from the law governing them, the participants in [commons] are their own law-givers and enforcers; they stand outside of any power concentration and or any claim of monopoly over violence. They overcome the artificial distinction between a private and a public sphere of their lives. Interpretation of law is here a nonprofessional exercise in the sharing of collective meaning. Law, when it is separated from depending on power and violence, is like language, culture, or the arts: it becomes a way through which a collectivity communicates and decides about itself."