This week actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard limply apologised for bringing their undeclared dogs into Australia in breach of biosecurity laws. In the face of the increasing environmental destruction legally occurring within Australia's borders, chasing Depp and Heard comes across as a curated media stunt.
If biosecurity laws are important, why has the infamous Indian company Adani been given the green light for the Carmichael coal mine which will disrupt the Great Barrier Reef, contribute to excessive carbon emissions and global warming: the biggest biosecurity threat Australia will ever face?
Recently the NSW government passed legislation exposing anti-fracking protestors to up to seven years in jail and fines of $5500. At the same time the Nepean River emits gas bubbles and riparians are outraged their livelihoods are threatened. Also, the Nothdurft family seek compensation from the Queensland Gas Company so they can leave their contaminated home because their children are sick from the leaking gas wells on their property.
Bob Brown has sought a High Court challenge against the new Tasmanian anti-protest laws in the High Court on constitutional grounds. With others, he was arrested for protesting against the destruction of native forests: the substance of what Australia's biosecurity laws intend to protect. These protestors face up to $10,000 in fines and potential imprisonment.
Like everywhere in the world, Australian environmental law is at a crossroads. On one hand government regulations that permit violence against habitat increase, and on the other, legal challenges against this destruction rise. As judges and mediators face more claims from communities and individuals about the effects of environmental destruction and the right to protect against it, governments ramp up the volume of legislation that allows such destruction.
As a lawyer, I cling to hope that courts might pull back this trend towards anti-democratic corporate tyranny and violence against the environment.
However, a central problem of our inherited legal system is the lack of a rich environmental jurisprudence which could gift judges precedents to adjudicate upon the obvious fact that humanity has obligations to its habitat: the environment.
Western legal systems are premised upon social and property rights. Property rights have become fragmented and confused: the right to enter private land and insert gas wells makes a mockery of the sanctity of private property. Intellectual property laws laugh at farmers who wish to control their practises so that genetically modified crops or pesticides don't drift onto their soil. Native Title ownership has proved easily undermined by the rights of extractive industries.
"It took 400 years for slavery to be outlawed. How long will it take for law to recognise that violence against habitat is not moral, ethical or acceptable in civilised communities?"
Western law is also obsessed with protecting against harm. This is the basis of its legitimacy and filters into almost every jurisdiction as a guiding principle. But it remains social harm: only humans matter, and anything else is property so can be treated badly.
This is reminiscent of slavery: the human was also once mere legal property. A problem in law is a problem in culture. It took 400 years for slavery to be outlawed. How long will it take for law to recognise that violence against habitat is not moral, ethical or acceptable in civilised communities?
Language and norms around the harm happening to the Earth are being revived: from the articulation of indigenous communities who already have language for the harm, to farmers living with increasing suicides. The environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht named the psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change as solastalgia, gifting a name to something many feel.
Globally, numerous communities suffer from undiagnosed traumatic disorders from living within the violence of peat fires, oil spills and poisonous dam bursts. For the rest who witness environmental destruction on screens, news reports and increasingly in their own habitats, I'm sure many feel revulsion, anger, discomfort, grief and powerlessness.
There's limited language to express these feelings: is it normal to feel such pain watching villages and rivers fill with toxicity? The scale of the destruction asks for grief, for recognition. It's abnormal to watch such destruction and feel nothing.
Australia has no excuse. It's a rich nation. It's the home of Aboriginal jurisprudence, the oldest, continuing ecological body of law. The government claims protection of Australia's unique biodiversity is so vital it invests money, time and energy into quarantine. Within its strong borders, biodiversity and livelihoods are increasingly under threat, and not from Boo and Pistol.
There will be more protestors, arrests, legal challenges and compensation claims — because ethically and legally there's something incredibly wrong, and populations from diverse demographics are starting to articulate this moral void and take action.
Human history and law is at a juncture where either it recognises that its habitat, the Earth's critical zone, is being harmed, and by extension humanity is harmed, or this violence continues.
Akin to what occurred with slavery, generations and courts of the future won't respect excuses such as jobs, the economy, and corporate interests. They'll have experienced the violence more than us, and have language, and hopefully laws, to condemn it.
The anti-protest laws applicable to those standing up against environmental violence need to be vigorously challenged. These protestors won't go down in history as deluded tree huggers, but as the noble vanguard that sought to change the law in order to stop violence. History will exonerate them.
Dr Bronwyn Lay worked as a lawyer in Melbourne before moving to France where she now works as an legal consultant for international NGOs. She is the creative director of the Dirt Foundation and her book Juris Materiarum: Empires of Earth, Soil, and Dirt will be released in mid 2016.