Socio-ecological thinking challenges the traditional approaches to human rights, based on an abstracted bounded individual subject atomised out of social relations and separated from any ecological world. Here, a socio-ecological relational approach is taken to human rights.
All posts by Alex
Rights of Nature: A (Critical) Overview
This article is taken from the foundations section of my (forthcoming) report about Rights of Nature legislation. I thought it was worth publishing as a stand-alone blog post. 2.1 An Overview of Rights of Nature In this section I seek to give an overview of the idea(s) of Rights of Nature and (briefly) set out […]
A Social Ecology Approach to Rights of Nature
An understanding of Social Ecology focuses the idea that Rights of Nature must be rooted in changing social relations. Note: this blog post was started by Alex May in early 2026. Due to severe illness Alex was unable to complete this alone. The unfinished blog was posted, with a description of the draft status at […]
Report: Realising Rights of Nature: Understanding the Variety of Legal Instruments
This Rights of Nature report maps out the variety of different legal instruments which have been developed globally in the pursuit of realising Rights of Nature.
Socio-Ecological Thinking and Environmental Law
Interconnected Law prompts us to think in terms of socio-ecological relations, coming from the key insight of Social Ecology that any environmental relations are intertwined with social relations. Ecological and environmental thinking is necessarily relational because ecology is relational and thinking about the environment is thinking about human relationships to it, and there is environmental law scholarship – such as socio-legal and political ecology approaches – which could be considered to be relational and perhaps sometimes within a socio-ecological paradigm. Yet most thinking is still rooted in conceptions of humans as fundamentally separate from nature, and often does not understand humans as socially relational.