1 INTRODUCTION

Living in the ‘Anthropocene’ implies living in times when ‘many conditions and processes on Earth are profoundly altered by human impact’.¹ Particular human activities have become a geophysical force capable of disrupting the relative ecological stability that has sustained life on Earth. Anthropogenic disruptions like global warming, and the current COVID-19 pandemic, are daunting examples of disastrous events caused by particular modes of living and inhabiting more-than-human worlds. In these unfolding human-caused disasters, CO₂ and SARS-CoV-2 act as powerful nonhuman agents, which, in turn, are disrupting the relative stability of political and legal orders. The entangled human-nonhuman agency at play in these intertwined phenomena displaces modernist views of human subjects separated from nonhuman objects. The reception of the ‘Anthropocene’ thesis in the humanities has therefore been described as a major ‘event’ that destabilizes modernist cuts between humans and nonhumans at work in social theory.²

Despite its wide deployment, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a controversial term, the definition, starting date and causes of which remain largely contested.³ What is at stake in those critiques is the problematic reassertion of universality through an Anthropos-cene that re-establishes a new form of ‘planetary humanism’ that risks erasing histories of violence and dispossession of the wretched of the modern world and disavows the multiple worlds inhabited with(in) ‘Anthropocenes’.⁴ This article therefore uses the semiotic construct of ‘Anthropocene/s’ to capture both the singularity implied by the ‘planetary condition’ associated with the ‘Anthropocene’ and the plurality of multiple ways of inhabiting, experiencing and engaging with(in) more-than-human worlds that unfold in ‘Anthropocenes’.⁵

Against this backdrop, the article interrogates what it would mean for law and legal theory to recognize the entangled human-nonhuman agency that the Anthropocene/s foregrounds. My argument aligns with those strands of critique that think with and against the Anthropocene to revisit the presuppositions of Western modernity – a modernity grounded in an image of ‘nature’ as an object amenable to ‘human’ mastery and control.⁶ Both the human subject and the natural world produced by Western modern taxonomies are here questioned and suspended. To this end, the article engages with intersecting strands of new materialist and posthumanist literatures that view the human as relationally entangled with nonhumans,⁷ thereby giving rise to post- or in-human approaches to subjectivity in more-than-human worlds.⁸ While post- or in-human theories have come of age and transitioned from the critical margins to become widely established across the humanities, they have tended to overlook, ignore or neglect antecedent decolonial critiques. As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson remarked, ‘[i]t has largely gone unnoticed by posthumanists that their queries into ontology often find their homologous (even anticipatory) appearance in decolonial philosophies that confront slavery and colonialism’s inextricability from the Enlightenment humanism they are trying to displace’.⁹ The turn(s) to materiality, relationality and agency discussed throughout this article align, therefore, with decolonial and indigenous authors who view nonhuman agency in non-modernist terms,¹⁰ and with critical Black scholars who call for ‘poetics of relation’ as processes of being, moving and being moved with(in) a ‘chaotic’ world.¹¹ In doing so, the article acknowledges the critiques of new materialist and posthumanist ontologies voiced by scholars working within the fields of Native/Indigenous and Black studies, and thinks with their politics of refusal.¹²

In evaluating legal dilemmas in light of these ‘onto-epistemological’ reconfigurations, the article diffracts the disciplinary commitments of international environmental law, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry and critique.¹³ It does so by situating, unpacking and problematizing the international legal doctrine of state responsibility for environmental protection. More specifically, the article explores which understandings of responsibility and protection are available to international legal thinking, and what it would mean to align these concepts to notions of response-ability and care as articulated in new materialist, relational and posthumanist literatures. Fundamentally, it is the underlying logic of international environmental law that this article seeks to challenge, rather than offering reformist or doctrinal fixes to be incorporated into existing legal frameworks.

The article is divided into three parts. I first identify a set of onto-epistemological reconfigurations of human and nonhuman relations that overcome modernist legacies of a putative disconnection between humans and nonhumans. While the analysis focuses on insights drawn from new materialism, posthumanism and object-oriented ontology – strands of theory that also have clear divergences from each other – it also considers insights from biology on a ‘symbiotic view of life’, demanding ‘sympoietic’ forms of thinking and acting. The second and third parts elaborate how the doctrinal legal notions of responsibility and protection expressed in international environmental law fit uncomfortably with the onto-epistemological reconfigurations explored in the first part. More specifically, the second part juxtaposes Haraway’s call to cultivate ‘response-ability’ as a form of collective knowing and doing and Barad’s agential realist form of ‘responsible intra-action’ with the ideal of responsibility in international environmental law – a normative trope restricted by conceptual and material coordinates of state sovereignty, territorial jurisdiction and strict liability. I use the concept of ‘response-ability’ in the singular to build on Haraway’s neologism and to refer to an ethical, political and juridical commitment that can materialize into different practices, modalities and expressions – distinct ‘response-abilities’. The third part of the article, in turn, explores how speculative ethics of care in more-than-human worlds, as advocated by Puig de la Bellacasa, could help rethink notions of environmental protection under international environmental law. The latter tend to be limited to the realm of the ‘human environment’, constrained by direct causality between the harm suffered and the remedy to be provided by the perpetrator, and tied to temporal, spatial and subjective criteria ill-suited to a ‘sympoietic’ view of life. Contraposing the doctrine of states’ responsibility to protect the(ir) environment with response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds helps to reconstrue both the destructive and the restorative relations between humans and nonhumans.

2 BEING, ACTING AND THINKING WITH(IN) THE ANTHROPOCENE/S

The Anthropocene constitutes a profoundly disorienting ‘event’.¹⁴ In an attempt to prevent or fix it, international environmental lawyers tend to focus their attention on regulatory and institutional reforms in order to ‘continue to try and maintain the current Holocene-like state’.¹⁵ In traditional international environmental law, ‘nature’ has primarily been regulated as a source for wealth generation – as ‘natural resources’ – while the ‘natural environment’ has mainly been construed as a passive object of human protection and control.¹⁶ For example, the rules on deep-seabed mining deploy extractive qualifications of ‘nature’ as a ‘resource’ to be allocated and exploited in regulated ways.¹⁷ Today, the modernist belief in a controllable ‘natural environment’ persists to such an extent that prominent international environmental scholars continue to contemplate whether the ‘organization of the Anthropocene is in our hands’¹⁸ – a question itself imbued with enduring ideals of instrumentalist voluntarism oriented towards ‘environmental management in the Anthropocene’.¹⁹

These legal schemes and normative aspirations for regulated exploitation, control and managed protection of the environment are permeated with an image of human mastery over an inert ‘nature’, which is directly inherited from Enlightenment thinking.²⁰ The relative stability of the Holocene and the related conception that ‘nature’ is amenable to human comprehension and control are therefore part and parcel of international environmental law’s edifice.²¹ Living with(in) the Anthropocene/s, however, signals the ‘end of the modern world’ and its ideals of stability, predictability and control.²² Far from a natural world mastered by humans and their juridical tools,²³ the ‘defiant’,²⁴ ‘uncontrollable’²⁵ or ‘unconstructable’²⁶ ‘nature’ at play in social ordering calls for different ways of engaging with and relating to more-than-human worlds.²⁷

Against this backdrop, the literature portraying the Anthropocene/s as an onto-epistemological rupture with modernist Enlightenment thought puts forward a relational sensibility that repositions humans with(in) a ‘vibrant material world’.²⁸ In this ‘web of materiality’, all matter – living and non-living – is entangled.²⁹ While grounded in different inquiries, with distinct emphases and interventions, new materialist, relational and posthumanist theories share an analytical focus on the dynamism of matter and the entanglement of human and nonhuman, living and non-living entities. Far from constituting a homogeneous style of theory and practice – and at times covering incompatible trajectories – these strands of thought aim at a distinct understanding of ontology, epistemology, ethics and politics to overcome anthropocentrism and discursive idealism.³⁰ They share an aspiration for practices of humility and care across species, acknowledging a mutual vulnerability that spans ‘the entire living order’ while also recognizing that not all inter- and intra-species vulnerabilities are the same, nor are they equally recognized or cared for.³¹ As Tsing puts it, this shared but differential precariousness entails a project of ‘collaborative survival’, since ‘[s]taying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations’.³²

This sense of cross-species collaboration resonates with Margulis’ theory of ‘symbiogenesis’, which she developed to define life-making and life-sustaining processes through the relating of ‘holobionts’ – or entities composed of a host and all other species living in or around it.³³ Barad’s neologism of ‘intra-action’ is useful here to understand the functioning of holobionts – and hence how life unfolds on Earth. Instead of traditional ‘interactions’, which assume separate individual agencies that precede each action, the concept of ‘intra-action’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled human-nonhuman agencies.³⁴ The intra-activity of holobionts displaces metaphysics of individualism. In line with Barad’s agential realist account, (holobiontic) matter is here viewed as ‘a dynamic expression/articulation of the world in its intra-active becoming’.³⁵ Holobionts, in other words, are assemblages created and sustained by the entangled agencies of different species. Contemporary biologists are therefore advocating a ‘symbiotic view of life’ as a new paradigm for biology, which establishes this symbiotic condition at the level of insular individuality itself, since animals and plants are composites of many species living, developing and evolving together.³⁶ As Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber evocatively put it: ‘[w]e are all lichens’.³⁷ Indeed, the Covid-19 pandemic brought to the fore how human bodies live with over 380 trillion viruses – some more disruptive than others – as part of a holobiont, and makes manifest how symbiotic continuities and multispecies dependencies are inescapable.³⁸ Such perspectives on human-nonhuman entanglements call for a relational onto-epistemology that captures the symbiotic nature of how life unfolds through co-constitutive agencies between species.³⁹ These cross-species alliances – and the contact zones triggered between traditionally distinct disciplines of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences – not only question whether ‘we have ever been modern’, but question whether ‘we have ever been individuals’ as well⁴⁰– two presuppositions at the heart of international environmental law.

Ontologically speaking, the condition of being is therefore itself a condition of living-with.⁴¹ As object-oriented philosopher Morton puts it, the nature of coexistence between humans and nonhumans is symbiotic – the real, in other words, is defined by entities related in symbiosis, where it is ‘unclear which is the top symbiont … who is the host, and who is the parasite’.⁴² What Morton calls the ‘symbiotic real’ is characterized by asymmetrical and non-total interconnections between entities across space and time. In light of this collective making of life and its limitless potentialities, a symbiotic view acknowledges the infinite possibilities of becoming that these encounters can generate.

Crucially, however, entanglement should not be mistaken for an absolute inseparability of all beings, nor an understanding that there are no differentiated power relations between humans and nonhumans. As Barad emphasizes, ‘agential separability’ implies both ‘differentiating and entangling’ without ‘producing (absolute) separation’.⁴³ Humans and nonhumans, in their intra-active becoming, continuously engage in emergent, dynamic and iterative ‘boundary-making practices that produce “objects” and “subjects” and other differences out of, and in terms of, a changing relationality’.⁴⁴ In these dynamics of intra-activity, questions of ‘space, time and matter are intimately connected’ and ‘entangled with questions of justice’.⁴⁵ As such, these onto-epistemological reconfigurations gesture towards a distinct practice of inquiry, one that ‘involves transformations not just of our ways of knowing but also of our ways of being, feeling, committing, and living in the world’.⁴⁶

As is argued in the next section, the ‘entangled relations of difference’⁴⁷ that are enacted through intra-actions entail asymmetrical power relations, with some actants bearing more ‘response-ability’ than others. The departure from presumptions of preexisting, independent, closed off entities – units, relata, subjects, objects – and insistence that ‘relata do not preexist relations’ but emerge through specific intra-actions,⁴⁸ creates a rupture with onto-epistemologies of fixed and bounded systems – whether these are understood as ‘nature’ or ‘society’, ‘states’ or ‘individuals’, ‘humans’ or ‘nonhumans’. Such relational onto-epistemologies also entail a break from the schemes of anthropocentric agency and direct causality central to international environmental legal thought and practice.

Does international environmental law’s notion of state responsibility leave room for such collective forms of being, acting and becoming, while remaining sensitive to differential and asymmetrical response-abilities? Could this legal domain be opened up to onto-epistemologies of becoming that offer ‘a metaphysics grounded in connection, challenging delusions of separation’?⁴⁹ In the next section, I critically explore the doctrine of state responsibility for environmental protection. My juxtaposition of this doctrine with a notion of response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds is not intended to propose a new norm to be incorporated in international environmental law’s extant framework, but to question the latter’s onto-epistemological premises and presuppositions.

3 FROM STATE RESPONSIBILITY TO INTRA-ACTIVE RESPONSE-ABILITIES

Under international law, a state is responsible for an internationally wrongful act, provided that the action or omission that led to the illegal act can be attributed to the state’s conduct or effective control.⁵⁰ These rules of state responsibility are difficult to apply to transboundary environmental harms, the spatial, temporal, subjective and causal ramifications of which are often impossible to fully comprehend.⁵¹ The attribution of such harms to individuated states is therefore particularly difficult to prove.⁵² Against this backdrop, a legal infrastructure has been established to safeguard environmental protection through forms of preventive, institutional and managerial collaborations. A network of international cooperation provides, for example, for states to share information and best practices, to undertake early consultations on environmental risks and impact assessments, to immediately notify affected states of existing problems, to provide technological and financial support, or agree to set limitations on the use of certain pollutants in order to jointly reduce environmental impacts.⁵³ States must also monitor their activities and ensure that the latter do not cause environmental harms both within their territory and areas under their effective control, as well as in other states’ territories. In the case of environmental harms, however, the question of attribution is inevitably challenging, and the conundrum it raises has been the object of extensive scrutiny and criticism on the part of international environmental legal scholars.⁵⁴ This problem of attribution of states’ responsibility for environmental harms has increasingly been addressed in light of resulting human rights violations, as is exemplified by the ‘rights turn’ in climate litigation.⁵⁵

In recent scholarship, proposals have also been advanced to expand responsibility for internationally wrongful acts to private (transnational) corporations and to extend the jurisdictional scope beyond territorial boundaries. As Seck puts it, ‘[w]hile the “international community” has taken steps to negotiate and implement numerous global environmental treaties, these initiatives are premised on the idea of a bounded regulatory state that is able and willing to control corporate conduct effectively within its borders’.⁵⁶ Not only is territorial limitation problematic, but, as Seck notes, ‘the invocation of extraterritoriality … risks undermining its objective, as it reinforces the myth of the bounded autonomous state while simultaneously endorsing the need to regulate across borders’.⁵⁷ My objective here is not to rehearse the critique of the attribution of wrongful acts based on a narrow understanding of state jurisdiction and territorial or effective control. Instead, I seek to build on Seck’s argument against ‘a vision of the territorially bounded sovereign state as an independent, autonomous being, which … is not only unhelpful, but undermines the critical importance of building mutually supportive relationships that acknowledge the reality of our ecological interdependence’.⁵⁸ This dominant vision of the state reinforces a legal infrastructure wherein each state is imagined to be individually responsible for the protection of the(ir) environment in a predetermined, fixed and bounded spatial grid, and where the state interacts with other equally independent and autonomous states to this end. Indeed, the jurisdiction and responsibility of states is still embedded in a spatial imaginary circumscribed by cartographic coordinates of longitude and latitude, delimited by borders and internal sovereignty, and based on the norm of non-intervention in domestic affairs.⁵⁹

Such modernist state theorization fits uncomfortably with the spatiality and entangled materialities that are suggested as new taxonomies to make sense of the Anthropocene/s. The ‘post-modern’ theorization of territory is equally problematic since it further marginalizes physical and material worlds by focusing on ‘de-territorial’ or ‘supra-territorial’ forms of globalization.⁶⁰ Both the rigid modernist understanding of fixed territorial boundaries and the tendency towards de-territorialized thinking in ‘post-modern’ legal theory are countered today by approaches aimed at terrestrializing the more-than-strategic and more-than-human dynamism of the Earth.⁶¹ This materialist turn in territorial theorizations addresses the non-static, vertical and volumetric qualities of terrestrial space, exploring new heights and depths from the atmosphere to the subterranean.⁶² It works with ‘ecological boundaries’ alongside biogeochemical cycles⁶³ and suggests a distinct spatiality for geopolitics.⁶⁴ Such revitalized materialist insights highlight the limits of the juristic ideal of a static, fixed and predetermined definition of territorial jurisdiction on which the attribution of responsibility for wrongful acts rests. Under international (environmental) law, in sum, territorial boundaries tend to exist as a ‘pre-given political knowledge’, in relation to which ‘much of international lawyers’ work is to take note of boundaries and divide powers and issues between states in a similarly straightforward, either-or fashion’.⁶⁵

Thinking with Haraway’s concept of ‘response-ability’ can provide inspiration for a reorientation of the trajectory of legal thought towards the kinds of relational onto-epistemologies introduced in the second section of this article. Indeed, an openness to continuously unfolding ‘times that remain at stake’ is well captured in Haraway’s call to cultivate ‘response-ability’ as a practice of ongoing collective knowing and doing, where the duty to respond to harms is inherently joined with the question of differentiated ability.⁷⁹ Haraway calls for responsible action in full recognition of specifically endowed abilities to respond to ‘shared’ yet differential afflictions.⁸⁰ Enacting ‘response-ability’ implies both an awareness that not all actants are equally responsible and able to respond to shared harms – a sensitivity also inherent to the principle of CBDRRC⁸¹ – and an acknowledgment of distributed agency between humans and nonhumans. Practices of ‘response-ability’, Haraway notes, help open passages for a praxis of care ‘in ongoing multispecies worlding’,⁸² without, however, reducing or minimizing differences in the destructive impact of actants.⁸³ As Haraway remarks: ‘[w]e are all responsible to and for shaping conditions for multispecies flourishing in the face of terrible histories, but not in the same ways. The differences matter – in ecologies, economies, species, lives’.⁸⁴ As a practice of ‘tentacular thinking and doing’,⁸⁵ ‘response-able’ state and non-state actors – human and nonhuman, corporate and other forms of techno-industrial agents – should be responsive to harms that know no absolutely fixed causal, subjective, spatial and temporal limits.

‘Response-ability’, in this sense, is embedded in what Haraway calls a process of ‘ongoingness’, where accountabilities are extensive and permanently unfinished.⁸⁶ What Haraway proposes here is an ecology inspired by a feminist ethic of ‘response-ability’ in which questions of species difference are always conjugated with attention to affect, entanglement and rupture.⁸⁷

Haraway’s concepts of ‘response-ability’ and ‘ongoingness’ find resonance in Barad’s agential realist understanding of ‘intra-actions’, which, as mentioned earlier, express agential separability yet never produce absolute separation between ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ of inquiry, knower and known.⁸⁸ With every new encounter, an entity intra-actively becomes other – it emerges anew from that intra-action. As such, humans and nonhumans come to matter and affect each other through their intra-active encounters. Agential separability accounts for the enduring patterns of differences, inclusions and exclusions in how the world unfolds and is configured, which produces divergent abilities to respond to such patterns. How humans differ among themselves and from other nonhumans, in other words, matters for the intra-active relations that compose them and which compose the world in its becoming.⁸⁹ It is in this important sense, Barad reminds us, that ‘[w]e are responsible for the world of which we are a part, not because it is an arbitrary construction of our choosing but because reality is sedimented out of particular practices that we have a role in shaping and through which we are shaped’.⁹⁰

For Barad, therefore, the agency of individual components cannot be isolated. Response-abilities for intra-actions take place within and as part of the world in its differential becoming. As a mutual constitution of entangled human-nonhuman agencies, every intra-active relation enacts an onto-epistemology anew.⁹¹ The knowing/being binary is thereby dismantled and reconfigured with(in) each new intra-active relation.

This dismantling of binaries is well captured by what indigenous scholar Watts refers to as a theoretical understanding of the world through ‘Place-Thought’.⁹² This non-binary, relational onto-epistemology rejects the liberal humanist conception of the subject and problematizes any understanding of responsibility that ‘begins and ends with a willful subject who is destined to reap the consequences of his actions’.⁹³ A sense of intra-active ‘response-ability’ exceeds both individualism and holism – abstractions that dissolve through the continuous reconfigurations of subjects and objects in a world of perpetual becoming.⁹⁴ In line with a symbiotic view of life, fixed, permanent and predetermined categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’ are discarded, as any fixity would inhibit possibilities for the iterative reconfiguring of human-nonhuman formations, and the schemes of response-abilities emerging with(in) them.⁹⁵ As Barad puts it: ‘[r]esponsibility – the ability to respond to the other – cannot be restricted to human-human encounters when the very boundaries and constitution of the “human” are continually being reconfigured and “our” role in these and other reconfigurings is precisely what “we” have to face’.⁹⁶

Crucially, however, while Barad’s agential realism and posthuman ethics of worlding focuses on an ‘understanding that we are not the only active beings’, this understanding ‘is never justification for deflecting that responsibility onto other entities’.⁹⁷ The agentic decentring and deformation of the ‘human’ does not deflect responsibility to ‘nonhumans’, but rethinks responsibility through the ‘more-than-human’. Recognizing nonhuman agency, Barad insists, does not reduce human accountability: ‘on the contrary, it means that accountability requires that much more attentiveness to existing power asymmetries’.⁹⁸ A redistribution of agency and accountability for response-abilities in more-than-human worlds, in sum, does not suspend or defer a reckoning with the disproportionally higher ‘response-ability’ of certain humans and their way of inhabiting and experiencing the Anthropocene/s at the expense of others.

While breaking from modernist modes of knowing and being, such onto-epistemologies do not remove exercises of human agency from scrutiny. The notion of intra-active ‘response-ability’ reconfigures understandings of subjectivity, agency and causality as well as the bounded temporal and spatial registers in which these are embedded. In contrast to the insulated agency of state or non-state entities – to which stable notions of responsibility can be tied – the onto-epistemological premises of intra-active response-abilities envisage an ongoing, continuously unfolding and open responsiveness to the entanglements of self and others where subjects, objects, matter, space and time are iteratively produced and performed in ‘a nonlinear enfolding of spacetimemattering’.⁹⁹

Juxtaposing the doctrinal notion of states’ responsibility to protect the(ir) environment with intra-active response-abilities of multiple and differentiated agencies shows the limits of the narrow conceptual understanding of human-nonhuman relations underpinning international environmental law. This understanding, I argue in the next section, informs an equally limited conception of protection of the human environment under international environmental law, which should be displaced by a notion of care in more-than-human worlds.

4 FROM ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION TO CARE IN MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS

Under international law, concerns for environmental protection first emerged by focusing on the ‘human environment’, the protection of which would preserve and enhance ‘the condition of man, his physical, mental and social well-being, his dignity and his enjoyment of basic human rights’.¹⁰⁰ As the title of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment epitomizes, international law’s approach to environmental protection put human interests at the centre of environmental concerns.¹⁰¹ Narratives of environmental protection have since evolved towards more ecocentric,¹⁰² acentric,¹⁰³ or Earth-centric¹⁰⁴ visions to guide normative regulations, understood as serving the benefits of more-than-human worlds rich in biodiversity.¹⁰⁵ The recognition of ‘rights of nature’ across various jurisdictions is often mentioned as an emblematic example of the progressive ecological reorientation of environmental protection.¹⁰⁶ Protecting so-called ‘natural’ entities by granting them rights tends to be viewed as a way of overturning humans’ extractive approach to ‘natural resources’ and, by some, as a veritable ‘legal revolution that could save the world’, as stated by the current UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment.¹⁰⁷ Yet, the extension of human rights to ‘natural’ entities might enhance their legal protection, but risks sacrificing their nonhuman agency and alterity by anthropomorphizing and moulding the protection of ‘natural entities’ into a human rights template.¹⁰⁸ This approach inhibits intra-active response-abilities based on non-binary, de-essentialized and ‘entangled relations of difference’.¹⁰⁹ Ultimately, the extension of liberal human rights to ‘nature’ hinges on a problematic human representation of the nonhuman.¹¹⁰ Even in international environmental law’s most ambitious protective schemes, in sum, nonhuman entities remain passive objects of human protection – an approach locked into a modernist idea of ‘nature’ as a mere site of masterful human intervention and control. To address these limits of environmental protection, I contend that a turn to care is key to the development of a praxis of response-abilities.

Attempts to transpose ethics of care to environmental concerns in international law are not new.¹¹¹ Ethics of care emerged in the 1980s as part of feminist theories – informed by intersectional gender, class and race politics – in the context of care work, whether in institutional or domestic settings.¹¹² The initial focus on individual self-care and collective care for the other expanded towards a sense of ‘care for the world’: a ‘world as the array of material and immaterial conditions under which human beings live – both with one another and with a rich variety of nonhumans, organic and technological’.¹¹³ Theorized as an affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world, care constitutes ‘a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others’.¹¹⁴ As such, care goes hand in hand with the relational onto-epistemologies put forward in this article and must therefore be distinguished from its metonyms of compassion or empathy.¹¹⁵ A relational disposition of care does not imply, to be clear, a symmetrical responsivity, let alone a balanced reciprocity. Nonhumans might well not care about humans – the reverse being true as well – yet humans and nonhumans depend upon each other in their intra-active becoming. In this sense, practices of care allow us to envision what it means for beings embedded within more-than-human compositions to be, always intra-actively, thriving in entangled caring relations.

As such, care generates a different mode of engaging with more-than-human worlds by productively interrogating not only who and what to care about but also how to (begin to) care about being-in-the-world.¹¹⁶ Unlike environmental protection schemes that regulate the use of products or activities through top-down, command-and-control management by identifiable centres of authority, an ethics of care is inherently open-ended and distributed. As Schrader puts it, ‘what or who counts as a subject of care cannot be delimited in advance’.¹¹⁷ Unlike the orthodox scheme of states’ responsibility for environmental protection, working with care is a process that is not merely normative and prescriptive, but requires responsiveness to harms for which there might not be a pre-given script. In line with Haraway’s ‘ongoingness’ and Barad’s ‘radically open future’, care breaks free from cause-and-effect thinking and from its linear and progressive spatio-temporality. In contrast to the rationalism of liberal subjects and modernist assumptions of linear progress, care demands a suspension of a given futurity and of the commanding of pre-established (re)actions towards it.¹¹⁸ The planning mentality of international environmental law – a mentality ill-suited for complex, unpredictable ‘worlds of becoming’¹¹⁹ – is here interrupted.

Puig de la Bellacasa’s turn to speculative care is particularly productive for making sense of this shift from environmental protection to care in more-than-human worlds. ‘Matters of care’, as she puts it, do not require a ‘translation into a fixed explanatory vision or a normative stance (moral or epistemological)’, but a speculative ethical commitment to ways of knowing and caring that ‘reaffect objectified worlds, restage things in ways that generate possibility for other ways of relating and living, connect things that were not supposed to be connecting across the bifurcation of consciousness’.¹²⁰ This speculative commitment to care opens up other possible worlds, politics and legalities. This approach resonates with a ‘non-correlationist’¹²¹ understanding of human-world relations, inviting speculations about the world beyond immediate human experience and representation.¹²² While spatio-temporal, subject-object ‘abyssal distances’ can separate ‘us’ from certain harms, a speculative commitment enables care beyond situated, embodied experience.¹²³ It entails a sense of care for what can be temporally, spatially and subjectively distant and (dis)continuous, for ‘insensible worlds’ that exceed immediate experiences and perceptions.¹²⁴ This means that response-abilities of care must be thought of ‘in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering’, or all other worlds or possible ‘otherwise’ that were not (yet) enacted.¹²⁵ As such, response-abilities of care resist the modernist drive of being in charge of environmental issues – by judging, predetermining and controlling what, who and how to protect the environment – and shifts towards being involved by remaining attentive to the unknown and open to the unknowable.¹²⁶ To return to Puig de la Bellacasa, it is about ‘becom[ing] “obliged” to care in actual practice and relational arrangements, in messy material constraints rather than through moral dispositions’.¹²⁷

This commitment to speculative care generates an ability to imagine other possible worlds, and acknowledges ‘fugitive’ and resistive socialities that disavow the modern world.¹²⁸ It takes us beyond the extant world of modernity and the subjectivities upon which it is grounded, to perform alternative ways of being, acting and thinking with(in) the Anthropocene/s. Against this backdrop, rethinking the legal doctrines of responsibility and protection through notions of response-abilities and care provides an opportunity to reconsider international environmental law and the world it enacts. Modes of legal theorizing responsive to such onto-epistemologies are already emerging. An expansion of our speculative sensorium of care in more-than-human worlds and the response-abilities that it entails would align, for example, with Matthews’ call to reorient international law towards the concept of obligation – or the sense of feeling obliged – against the ‘ever-expanding and diversifying “rights-talk”’ in order to emphasize a ‘being-in-community’.¹²⁹ As the etymological root of the word ‘obligation’ (ligare) suggests, obligations are ultimately concerned with ‘binding beings’.¹³⁰ The emerging field of ‘law for the Anthropocene’¹³¹ also testifies to an increasing interest in alternative onto-epistemologies for worlds-otherwise, in which ‘we’ would engage with, relate to and feel (legally) obligated towards more-than-human worlds in different, symbiotic ways.¹³² Adding to this field of literature that interrogates how legal thought and practice could operate with such ways of being, acting and knowing with(in) the Anthropocene/s, response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds can help us think beyond the legal responsibility of states to protect the(ir) environment as given under international environmental law.

5 CONCLUSION

In this article, I have explored how the doctrinal notions of responsibility for and protection from environmental harms, as constituted under international environmental law, configure human-nonhuman relations in ways that reinforce modernist understandings that are ill-attuned to the realities that the Anthropocene/s foreground. I have refrained from deploying a reformist, regulatory and interventionist gaze that seeks to problem-solve particular environmental issues through command-and-control management or more ambitious international environmental norms. Instead, my contribution has been aimed at interrogating these prevalent practices and disciplinary commitments, which, I have argued, perpetuate a modernist mindset that views ‘nature’ as a site amenable to human intervention and control. In the face of globally shared – yet unequally distributed – planetary predicaments, the driving impulse in international environmental law is to enhance and secure state responsibility for environmental protection. It is this mode of engagement that I have sought to diffract.

In doing so, my analysis has built on the literature that affirms the Anthropocene/s as a condition to live with(in), and which attempts to make sense of the ‘desedimentation’ of the modern world.¹³³ The argument took as an onto-epistemological default position a sense of being and living in modernist ruins, with(in) fragile, symbiotic and contingent more-than-human worlds. Adopting an affirmative perspective, I framed the Anthropocene/s as a generative event – an opportunity for ways of being, acting and living beyond or besides modernity.¹³⁴ Indeed, affirmative approaches are seen as liberating critical thought from the constraints of modernist and anthropocentric thinking by displacing the ‘arrogance of human-centred perspectives’ that focus on identifying possible ways out from supposedly temporal crises and thereby securing the ‘modern’ world before it is too late.¹³⁵ Scholars affirming the Anthropocene/s find something liberating in the realization that there is no escape from it, that it ‘cannot be secured, governed or engaged with in traditional ways’.¹³⁶ Perhaps counter-intuitively, Anthropocene/s are welcomed in celebratory terms, with the ruins of the world as it was conceived in modernity being embraced, rather than mourned. A generative sense of being and becoming with(in) more-than-human worlds invites us to value human (im)potentiality,¹³⁷ and unleashes an enhanced sense of humility, thereby opening up new forms of collective attachments and care.¹³⁸

For international environmental law/yers, this exercise can seem profoundly disorienting, as it challenges the logic of law itself and its telos of providing order, stability and predictability. As instantiated by the rules on state responsibility, individuated actors must intervene to ensure the well-being of their citizens against the effects of predetermined environmental harms, with particular spatio-temporal delimitations and specific subjects and objects of protection in sight. A circumscription both of the harms – their effects on predefined subjects and objects – and of the actors involved – states held accountable by legal subjects – scaffolds the doctrine of state responsibility for environmental protection. A ‘stable world’ divided into delimited sites of authority and control and locked within a linear spatio-temporality is thereby taken for granted. But what if we alter our gaze and attempt to care in disordered, unstable and unpredictable more-than-human worlds, not intelligible to modernist registers of thought and practice? Far from producing a sense of doom, moving beyond the world qua modernity and its governing responses opens up different ways of engaging, relating and feeling response-able with others.

Fundamentally, I have not advanced the notion of response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds as a new legal norm that should be recognized in an international environmental treaty ratified by states. My intervention is not meant to apply at the surface of international environmental law but at the depth of it: by questioning the onto-epistemological premises of extant international environmental laws that enact how states and non-state actors govern life on Earth and the human-nonhuman relations that constitute it. Thinking with response-abilities of care in more-than-human worlds can inspire a novel imagination and new sense of possible legal commitments. I side with Barad to justify this choice, since ‘[i]n an important sense, it matters to the world how the world comes to matter’.¹³⁹