Entropy: Dynamism, Hyperchaos and the Fourth Dimension in “Speculative Environmental Law Practice” Lucy Finchett-Maddock Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. and Brooks, V. (Eds.) (2016) ‘Research Methods in Law Series (Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law)’, London, Edward Elgar Publishing This chapter seeks to approach environmental law education through a ‘speculative’ methodology of entropy in environmental law practice. It is suggested that entropy as the basis of a theory of and its usefulness in terms of understanding ‘complexity’, systems of law, ecosystems and the human and non-human relationships between them at the same time, is helpful when considering the protection of the environment and how we may teach the law that regulates this, and discover it in educational and daily practice. Complexity accounts for both micro and macro behavior and how agents and systems interact and integrate with their environment, and thus it is argued as an appropriate framework in the study of environmental law, accounting for not just individual rights and the actions of states or corporations, common rights and the rights of non-human entities and the environment over all, but also relations between these and even rights that we do not yet know nor understand. This is why the complex-adaptive processes of entropy are speculative as they take in to account the dynamism and preponderance of chaos, uncertainty and the unknown within and outside law and the environment and our multi-faceted relationships within its matrix, highlighting the enigmatic and becoming nature of the external world, our relation to it and the law that governs it. A speculative understanding of entropy also confers both understandings of linear and nonlinear time, where complex thermodynamics not only attests to time existing chronologically, but in other formulations that we may not even have the words as yet to describe. Why is this useful to the practical understanding of environmental law? How are we to know how to govern ourselves in relation to the world or even envision new and unknown understandings of rights and law if we do not yet know if there is an alternate reality beyond what we have constructed for ourselves?
“Speculative Entropy: Dynamism, Hyperchaos and the Fourth Dimension in Environmental Law Practice” Lucy Finchett-Maddock Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. and Brooks, V. (Eds.) (2016) ‘Research Methods in Law Series (Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law)’, London, Edward Elgar Publishing This chapter seeks to approach environmental law education through a ‘speculative’ methodology of entropy in environmental law practice. It is suggested that entropy as the basis of a theory of ‘complexity’, and its usefulness in terms of understanding systems of law, ecosystems and the human and non-human relationships between them at the same time, is helpful when considering the protection of the environment and how we may teach the law that regulates this, and discover it in educational and daily practice. Complexity accounts for both micro and macro behavior and how agents and systems interact and integrate with their environment, and thus it is argued as an appropriate framework in the study of environmental law, accounting for not just individual rights and the actions of states or corporations, common rights and the rights of non-human entities and the environment over all, but also relations between these and even rights that we do not yet know nor understand. This is why the complex-adaptive processes of entropy are speculative as they take in to account the dynamism and preponderance of chaos, uncertainty and the unknown within and outside law and the environment and our multi-faceted relationships within its matrix, highlighting the enigmatic and becoming nature of the external world, our relation to it and the law that governs it. A speculative understanding of entropy also confers both understandings of linear and nonlinear time, where complex thermodynamics not only attests to time existing chronologically, but in other formulations that we may not even have the words as yet to describe. Why is this useful to the practical understanding of environmental law? How are we to know how to govern ourselves in relation to the world or even envision new and unknown understandings of rights and law if we do not yet know if there is an alternate reality beyond what we have constructed for ourselves?
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