What Can International Climate Law Learn from Plankton and Penguins?

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The Multispecies Collective Dialogue Series is our series of events that shines a spotlight on non-members’ research or practice toward multispecies flourishing. In this dialogue, Dr Mai explores how international climate law might begin to register more-than-human temporalities – those distant pasts, deep futures, and multispecies rhythms that shape planetary processes and enable more-than-human lives. While geological archives and affective encounters offer fleeting access to these unfamiliar and strange temporal scales, legal frameworks continue to privilege human-centred notions of time. In the context of international climate law, for instance, symbolic references to ecosystems and invocations of ‘Mother Earth’ have not unsettled tacitly inscribed anthropocentric assumptions. Drawing on two narratives – of plankton sedimentation that produced the fertile grounds of the U.S. Black Belt and a penguin colony in Sydney harbour – this talk shows how human and other-than-human temporalities are entangled and why legal responses to climate change must begin to register these…