Trickster Law: Promoting Resilience and Adaptive Governance By Allowing Other Perspectives on Natural Resource Management

Abstract

A multiplicity of anthropogenic stressors are individually and collectively making natural resources management a realm of pervasive uncertainty. New and legacy pollution—particularly the global spread of plastics and persistent organic pollutants and the tremendous level of nutrient loading —threaten both human and non-human health as well as larger social-ecological function. Loss of biodiversity has become egregious enough to be dubbed the Sixth Mass Extinction, while the impacts of climate change are driving the plethora of species that remain to shift their ranges and intermix in ways that have never occurred before.6 More pervasively, climate change and its “evil twin,” ocean acidification, are altering the basic conditions of planetary function—from global average and local temperatures, to ocean currents, to precipitation patterns, to water supply, to vegetation patterns, to marine chemistry, and much more. At the same time, both the global population of humans10 and their consumeristic impulses continue to increase, leading footprint studies to conclude that we are collectively consuming far more than one Earth’s worth of goods and services every year. Unless and until greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere stabilize, we can’t expect to just hunker down and survive until a “new normal” emerges. Instead, for a while, everything will be changing all the time—including the natural resources upon which all human societies depend. Welcome to the Anthropocene. As Melinda Harm Benson and I argued in The End of Sustainability, this new reality means that managing for "sustainable" use of natural resources will become increasingly impossible. Trickster law offers a new perspective on environmental and natural resources law by combining new scientific models, adaptive governance theory, and a new cultural narrative to allow these areas of law to better cope with the realities of the Anthropocene. In particular, this essay focuses on how, by allowing room for new voices and values, trickster law can contribute to the emergence of different priorities and structures of natural resource management that promote the resilience of social-ecological systems in a changing world.