“Legal measures of the forests” is part of a broader research project on the European Laws of the Forest and explores an epistemological question: What are the various ways forests are being measured in EU law and which parts of the protection of forest sites resist quantification?
The research aims at drawing a more differentiated categorization of the kinds of lay/expert/experimental/fundamental knowledges involved in legally ascertaining forests. Ultimately the research aims to understand the bearings of the legal recognition of knowledge on the protection of natural environments.
The kind of knowledge necessary to protect such a natural milieu matters. In accordance with the Green Deal numerous legal instruments summarized in the EU Forest Strategy for 2030 integrate forests into vast carbon-trading systems with the explicit purpose to optimize them as carbon sinks . Such trading systems designed by EU law to achieve ecological resilience rely on expert-knowledge meant to encourage ecological and administrative efficiency within a market paradigm. By contrast, other kinds of protection relate to different measures of nature within the EU’s regulations and legal reasonings. Indeed, planetary legal imaginaries can be employed to resist fragmented framings which favor nature’s extraction, circulation and compensation. The contrast between planetary and sectoral approaches doesn’t necessarily oppose conservation and destruction of natural environments – compensation mechanisms too, such as the carbon trading system, are meant to protect the planet. However, planetary representations do something else/more than to systematize legal dealings with nature on a world-wide scale. Nature’s entirety describes a quality rather than a range: the entangled biological, climatic, human and non-human dependencies a natural eco-system’s life (and indeed survival) relies on.
A significant conceptual development has been nesting in EU law: the endowment of natural environments with integrity. First mentioned in the Habitat directive at the stage where administrative obligations for the conservation of protected sites are made explicit, ecological integrity has consolidated into a legal concept invested with substantive and procedural meaning in the ECJ’s caselaw. The notion captures a specific kind of environmental protection. Based on the assumption that, once destroyed, the intricate web biological and geological conditions that sustain animal and vegetal life cannot be restored, integrity stands for the continuous preservation of the wholeness of an ecosystem. My contribution’s purpose is to substantiate the meaning of ecological integrity as it becomes apparent that its most significant feature is non-fungibility. Protecting integrity runs counter to environmental protection frameworks based on compensation for harm, as for example the emission trading system. Instead, nature is protected as a form of life that ultimately resists being seized up and measured in value equivalents or lump sums.
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