Fiction as legal method: Imagining with the more-than-human to awaken our plural selves

• Main Author: LIM, Michelle Mei Ling
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Environmental Law; Legal Writing and Research
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sol_research/4097
• Institution: Singapore Management University

"Have you ever wondered what it might be like to be alone in this world? Completely alone. To be the last of your kind. To be…an endling" An endling is the last remaining individual of a plant or animal species. The quote above is from the ‘endling novella’ contained within my recent publication in the Griffith Law Review.2 In that journal article, I speak in different voices. One voice is traditionally academic—an analytical examination of extinction within the literature and within the law. The other voices are the human and non-human voices of the characters of the novella: Nature’s Ghost, Live-Human and endlings past (Muru, the last Thylacine), recent (Gump, the final Christmas Island Forest Skink) and future (Myrme, the ultimate numbat). I do not seek to reproduce that work here. I do want you to imagine a present and a multitude of possible futures from the perspective of an ‘other-than-human’ being. I do want you to wonder what it might be like to be the last of a kind.Both radical imagination and relational imagining with our more-than-human kin3 are needed to address the interconnected challenges of the Anthropocene such as extinction, climate change, and inequity. Yet, as Boulot and Sterlin highlight, environmental law remains in a ‘one-world-world paradigm’. A paradigm where ‘human’ use of the ‘environment’ is premised on determining allowable harm rather than on obligations to, and relationships with, more-than-human nature.4 If environmental law scholarship is to remain useful given the novel implications of global environmental change, there is the need not only for new and ‘better’ collectives of knowledge5 but also more expansive and inclusive paradigms.In this comment, I aim to interrogate and articulate why seeing through the lens of the more-than-human and embracing fiction as legal method are key to developing more hopeful, inclusive, and radical imaginations and imaginaries for environmental law in the Anthropocene. Through this comment, I hope to contribute to calls for greater responsibility, cooperation and plurality in the construction and analysis of knowledge for environmental law.