Travessias (Apr 2020)
The legal (in) effectiveness of the personification of nature: an ecolinguistic analysis of legal measures for environmental protection
Abstract
The importance of protecting nature was emphasized in written speeches dating from the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, several scientific fields, academic disciplines and public policies have taken nature as their object in order to produce speeches that guarantee their protection. One of the measures found by the legal system of some countries, such as Ecuador, India and New Zealand, was the embodiment of nature, bringing a biocentric vision to the legal sphere, which is also discussed in Brazil today. The present work seeks to compare the speeches produced in sentences, some from countries that intend to bring a biocentric vision to the Law and others, from countries considered anthropocentric, in order to verify if there really are ideological differences between their speeches, without going into scientific legal issues. . For that, we will use Ecolinguistics as a theoretical framework, a discipline that deals with language issues in an ecological and holistic way, and Legal Realism, characterized as an epistemology or a method of Law that addresses the legal phenomenon from empiricism. Through the analysis, we found that the personification of nature does not guarantee legal effectiveness, on the contrary, it only characterizes the masking of anthropocentric and capitalist ideologies, in the form of a distorted biocentrism.
