Grounding legal and advocacy strategies in place and community.
The importance of connecting legal and advocacy strategy with place and community.
Our current global challenges are unprecedented. While we have access to a lot of useful information and projections about the state of the world, we also can’t say exactly how cascading crises might unfold and what unexpected events will occur. In these circumstances, rethinking the way we practice law - and indeed how we even conceive of law itself - can support us to put in place resilient practices as we move forward.
At the moment when we come together to devise legal and advocacy strategies, we generally do so in conventional settings - offices, conference centres and hotel meeting rooms - and from an analytical and intellectual viewpoint that ignores the fact that we are inextricably entwined and embedded within dynamic ecological water, soil, forest, air and other natural systems. In acting intentionally to transform our relationship with the rest of the natural world, it is also essential to contextualise our discussions and actions within place, at the level of bioregions and beyond. We must seek to create the conditions for understanding ourselves not as separate selves but fundamentally in relationship with the whole earth community. In doing so, we support a shift away from nature as property towards relationship, away from commodification and extraction towards reciprocity and guardianship.
What does this mean in practice?
Grounding our legal and advocacy strategies means ensuring that we hold space within our workshops and activism to be open to the diverse perspectives, forms of wisdom, and ways of knowing that exist. While there is no single path, ways of exploring these include embodied, experiential learning, active cultivation of attitudes of intense curiosity and gratitude in relation to the world, practices of deep belonging and connection, and holding space for individual and collective visioning and imagination about what futures might be possible.
Through such practices, we seek to transform our self-interest into collective interest and broaden our purpose and activities from the individual or solely human perspective. From this foundation, it becomes easier to practice law in true alignment with the truth of ecological, climate and social breakdown, and to create legal frameworks that serve a shared story of interbeing, restoration and connection.
Current activities.
Our current projects include the development of creative facilitation techniques for workshops and activism, related to: bioregional governance and eco-cultural mapping; language and the law; embodied practices such as qi gong, meditation and deep nature immersion; meaningful participation through peoples’ law tribunals and citizen assemblies; practices to connect visioning and action; and more.
Please get in touch if you would like support in integrating similar practices into your workshops or other facilitation activities.