“Environmental Basic Law” is a legal utopia, a sober rational revolution, articulated by paragraphs as intricate as they are fascinating. It is about the future of our society, and so is everything. In the first part of his book, law professor Jens Kerstein takes a sober look at the state of our society. We have located ourselves in the Anthropocene, that is, in a new geological era in which humanity will have a dominant influence on the Earth system and be responsible for a series of fundamental existential crises: climate change threatens the future viability of the planet; The global extinction of species and the destruction of ecosystems has already progressed well. However, this reality has not really arrived yet: »However, we are still playing for time and at the same time knowing: the longer we wait, the more drastic the climate cuts to our freedoms will be, and the more blatantly social inequality will be at the same time. environmental, locally and nationally and will continue to escalate globally,” Kirsten writes.
To overcome inaction, Kirsten recommends “dams against self-destruction”—he is convinced that important dams can be constitutional barriers that allow society to act more responsibly. At the same time, he also thinks more about the concept of tipping points, which are the points at which chain reactions in the context of global warming become irreversible. The problem with this is that it’s often not seen as part of our reality, but merely as a possible future danger that doesn’t seem to need immediate action yet. As an appendix and specification, the author introduces the term “drift,” which is a self-accelerating slide into climate hell.
The book is an attempt to counteract this slippage with the help of the Constitution. The Basic Law must be strengthened and adapted to meet current threats. To do this, Kersten takes on all the Articles of the Basic Law that, in his opinion, need to be supplemented in terms of ecology and nature: At the beginning of the section, there is always an Article of the Basic Law in which the new environmental version is highlighted in italics.
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