When Law Runs Up Against Planetary and More-than-Human Temporalities

By Laura Mai, Veerle Platvoet, and Iyan Offor

This blog post follows a Research Dialogue between Dr Laura Mai (Amsterdam), Dr Veerle Platvoet (Heidelberg), Dr Iyan Offor (Birmingham), and the wider community of the Multispecies Collective. The Dialogue took place at Birmingham Law School and online on 11 February 2026. Our conversation explored how law encounters planetary and more-than-human temporalities, and what this means for law, governance, and legal scholarship.

Iyan: Laura, during our seminar, you shared insights from your forthcoming monograph In A State of Change with us. Would you like to briefly tell us about the book?

Laura: Sure! The book builds on my work on the concept of transformation. I developed this notion into an analytical framework for making sense of what climate change demands of law. In a nutshell, I argue that climate change places new demands on law – in terms of how law conceives of time, how it participates in the dynamic tension between stability and change, and the ways in which law mediates political engagement. In the book, I look at each of these dimensions – time, change, and engagement – in the context of the international climate regime as it developed since the 2015 Paris Agreement. And I had the pleasure to present my thinking on time during our Research Dialogue; specifically, how law encounters deep pasts, distant futures, and more-than-human temporal rhythms.

Veerle: Why do you choose to focus on time? What aspects can a temporal frame of analysis bring to the fore which might otherwise remain less visible?

Laura: In critical and socio-legal scholarship, temporal analysis has been an important entry point – both within and beyond the fields of environmental and climate change law. I am thinking here of the work by Carol Greenhouse, Mariana Valverde, Emily Grabham, Eliana Cusato, and Julia Dehm for instance. These scholars have shown us how time is not an innocent canvas on which law is being painted; but that naturalized assumptions about time – which are often tacitly absorbed into legal frameworks – have direct implications for the allocation of responsibilities and questions of justice, including in terms of distribution, reparation, and recognition.

In the context of climate change, these intersections are particularly pertinent. For one, climate change unsettles dominant linear conceptions of time. From the mainstream perspective, we can say that climate pasts, climate presents, and climate futures appear as a neat sequence, they follow one after another and are represented as a timeline which runs from the left to the right side of the page. In the context of climate change, however, this temporal understanding cannot hold. We have to reckon with the fact that what has been done 100 years ago determines climatic conditions today and in presents that are yet to arrive. In this sense, I have described time as becoming layered with pasts, presents, and futures already containing each other as ‘pasts-presents-futures’.

What is more, climate change unsettles ‘our’ habitual temporal frames of reference – often the next two to three decades. As the IPCC has made clear, when it comes to climate change, we are talking on the scales of centuries and millennia; and we have to consider not only the temporal rhythms of human societies but also those of ecosystems, other-than-human animals, and plants. The point is that without grasping these temporal dimensions – deep geological timescales and more-than-human temporal coordinations – legal responses to climate change are already off to a bad start.

Laura: I feel that this is really the point of connection where our research intersects. I’m curious, what work do the notions of the ‘more-than-human’ and the ‘planet’ do in your thinking? And which other notions do you work with – for instance, multispecies flourishing, agency, multi-being, vitality, or animacy?

Veerle: The more-than-human is centred in my work, both in terms of doctrinal analysis of current legal frameworks and how they treat and shape our relationship with the more-than-human, and in terms of considering international law and the way states can advance the protection of the more-than-human from human harm through the doctrines of regulatory autonomy and responsibility. In my PhD, I conducted a doctrinal analysis of EU wildlife law, and offered a posthumanist perspective on rethinking the conflicts that are often perceived between animal welfare and animal conservation that centres animal agency as co-constituents of the law. In my current research, I focus on the international legal order, and how we can interact with international law to create multispecies justice.

Iyan: I really like the more-than-human framing you use, Veerle. Especially with the exciting recent work of the More-Than-Human Life Program making waves in our field. In my own work, and through conversations with members of the Multispecies Collective, I have taken to multispecies as an alternative notion which I explain in a recent essay. I am drawn to how a multispecies framing attributes significance to the perspectives, embodied experiences, and worldviews of the more-than-human world in a way which decentres the human from intellectual thought. I see value in recognizing the plurality of this, as you highlight, Laura, in referring to ‘pasts-presents-futures’. The multispecies framing also takes seriously the experiences of lifeforms beyond the human, places humans within our ecological networks, and considers philosophical and intellectual ideas from such a position. I consider the planetary boundaries associated with planetary thinking to be in need of multispecies boundaries and societal boundaries as well, as I argue together with Antonio Cardesa-Salzmann in a recent chapter on Multispecies Lawscapes in the Anthropocene.

Laura: That’s a really interesting connection, Iyan, which you are drawing here between the literature on planetary boundaries and what you describe as ‘multispecies boundaries’. The planetary boundaries framework has arguably done quite a good job of translating scientific findings into policy-contexts. But there is a risk of tokenism here – of referring to planetary boundaries without substantially engaging with their implications: what it would really mean to reorganize societies to keep within these limits. Another critique which has been articulated is the framework’s move towards ‘measurementality’ and over-reliance on data and reporting practices to track progress towards achieving biodiversity and climate targets.

Laura: Generally speaking, when working in planetary or more-than-human registers, there is a latent risk of instrumentalising, extracting and essentialising. How do you deal with this in your work?

Iyan: You make a really good point, Laura, and this feels so important to guard against. As you so wonderfully articulated in our Research Dialogue, multi-sensory noticing and embodiment feel key here. My sense is that intellectual investigation alone is an insufficient encounter with the more-than-human world and that more meaningful practices that (re)embed humans within nature, instead of apart from it, at least provide us with a better starting point from which to avoid instrumentalization. A classic, impactful articulation of this that I love is Rosi Braidotti’s exploration of becoming animal.

Veerle: I completely agree, Iyan. To some extent, I feel, such risks are unavoidable, as we always perceive through our own experience and ‘Umwelt’. However, this awareness is often the first step, and with it the understanding that all other beings have an Umwelt of their own. For me, this helps to acknowledge that the more-than-human acts as agents of change and agents of law themselves and, if we take efforts to perceive, can co-constitute the law through living-with, migrating, consuming, and dying.

Veerle: Questions of perception and agency have a clear temporal, but also a spatial, dimension. Laura, how do you see the spatial connected to the temporal? How does this come across in your work?

Laura: Excellent question, Veerle! For me time and space necessarily hang together; but for analytical purposes, I feel it can be useful to artificially separate them – only to them pull them back together eventually. In my new project, Legal Geographies of Climate Change, I explicitly engage with notions of space and place to show why they are essential when talking about climate justice and responsibility. Thinking along these lines, I seek to connect critical theoretical work with current legal developments, including in climate litigation and the international climate regime.

Iyan: This actually speaks nicely to several points discussed with those who participated in the Research Dialogue. Our conversation flowed through alternative conceptions of time and how they do, and do not, find traction in applied legal and policy discourse. We also spoke about how climate change might be perceived differently across generations. The significance of this for education was noted, where the deep time of climate change and ecological functioning sits in tension with the urgency that confronts us all. We seemed to agree that, through research and education, thinking about alternative conceptions of time could be a useful conversation to counter apathetic climate nihilism. Thinkers like you are doing such important work in this regard, Laura. I wonder if you have any parting wisdom regarding agency, climate change, plankton, and penguins.

Laura: I’m so glad you bring in plankton and penguins here, Iyan. In my presentation, and in the book, I draw on two stories that take us to the ‘Black Belt’, a region in the Southern US, where the effects of plankton sedimentation from more than 100 million years ago can still be felt today, and to Manly Harbour in Sydney and its local penguin colony. I am inspired here by the work of political scientist Frederich Hanusch, who has written about the Politics of Deep Time, and environmental humanities scholar Thom Van Dooren and his book Flight Ways. I feel that working with stories is a mode of writing that can touch on affective registers. Engaging with narrative, in this sense, is a useful complement to more traditional analytical writing – specifically when engaging with questions of perception and the more-than-human.

This blog post is also shared on Laura's Legal Geographies of Climate Change website here.

Laura’s presentation slides are available for download here.

For similar conversations, register for upcoming events of the Multispecies Collective here.