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One of the problems encountered in bringing the discourses of human rights and environment together concerns the philosophical foundations lying beneath certain closures of liberal (legal) theory. Linking a destructive mind/body split to the destructive relationship between ‘humanity’ and the ‘environment’, the author argues that a critical analysis of legal anthropomorphism reveals a fundamental failure of representation at its heart, in so far as the ‘human being’ qua ‘human being’ is not fully included in it. On further analysis human beings can be seen to be functionally united with non-human animals and the environment in a form of conceptual exclusion linked to certain violences of capitalism. The author reflects upon the thought of Merleau-Ponty, offering it as a basis for an alternative philosophical lens through which to understand the relationship between human rights and the environment, one uniting them in the ontological vulnerability of the living order itself. Human beings, in this light, are not the hyper-rational subjects of liberal legal theory acting upon an objectified, exploitable ‘nature’. We are, rather, part of a living tissue of interconnection bearing profound implications for ethics, epistemology and legal theory.

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IntroductionIn the early twenty-first century, and looking beyond it, the landscapes of law's operation are characterised by a growing degree of complexity and pressure. Law is called upon to coordinate relations in a world facing a significant complexities produced by a convergence between biotechnological developments capable of transforming the very conditions of life itself, 1 climatechange pressures and the threat of the collapse of bio-diversity and eco-systems, and intensifying global inter-dependencies deepening vulnerability on a whole set of scales and measures.2 Law itself is a dominant sphere of social coordination within and through which patterns of complexity and inter-dependence emerge. Increasingly dense regulatory networks and interpermeations at all levels between systems and sub-systems of juridical norms in the context of globalisation infinitely complicate past assumptions concerning the very conceptual possibility of drawing clean legal boundaries -and render, as Twining has argued -the standard and somewhat 'black-box' assumptions of traditional jurisprudence inapt. 3 An almost dizzying range of factors are now understood to generate or multiply legal relations or, minimally, as being 'relevant to analysis of patterns of legal and law-related relations in the modern world'. 4 Neat systemic delineations -even those traditionally conceived of as internal to law, such as clean 'boundaries' between systems of legal norms -are now extensively problematised by legal interpenetrations ('inter-legalities' 5 ), law's multiple scenes and contexts and heterogeneity.6 Such complex, hybrid and diverse juridical patterns form an analogue to the structural complexities visible in biotechnological developments, in new hybridities and the numerous contemporary theoretical and practical manifestations of heterogeneity, multiplicity and complexity emerging in a range of disciplines, including cybernetics, techno-theory, post-humanism and ecology.