“Speculative Entropy: Dynamism, Hyperchaos and the Fourth Dimension in Environmental Law Practice” Lucy Finchett-Maddock Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. and Brooks, V. (Eds.) (2016) ‘Research Methods in Law Series (Handbook of Research Methods in Environmental Law)’, London, Edward Elgar Publishing This chapter seeks to approach environmental law education through a ‘speculative’ methodology of entropy in environmental law practice. It is suggested that entropy as the basis of a theory of ‘complexity’, and its usefulness in terms of understanding systems of law, ecosystems and the human and non-human relationships between them at the same time, is helpful when considering the protection of the environment and how we may teach the law that regulates this, and discover it in educational and daily practice. Complexity accounts for both micro and macro behavior and how agents and systems interact and integrate with their environment, and thus it is argued as an appropriate framework in the study of environmental law, accounting for not just individual rights and the actions of states or corporations, common rights and the rights of non-human entities and the environment over all, but also relations between these and even rights that we do not yet know nor understand. This is why the complex-adaptive processes of entropy are speculative as they take in to account the dynamism and preponderance of chaos, uncertainty and the unknown within and outside law and the environment and our multi-faceted relationships within its matrix, highlighting the enigmatic and becoming nature of the external world, our relation to it and the law that governs it. A speculative understanding of entropy also confers both understandings of linear and nonlinear time, where complex thermodynamics not only attests to time existing chronologically, but in other formulations that we may not even have the words as yet to describe. Why is this useful to the practical understanding of environmental law? How are we to know how to govern ourselves in relation to the world or even envision new and unknown understandings of rights and law if we do not yet know if there is an alternate reality beyond what we have constructed for ourselves?
assemblage, a constituent neither superior nor inferior in the law-environment matrix. Environmental education in recent years has sought to underline the ‘lived reality of environmental crisis’ through reinvigorating and re-educating both young and old on nature to which Houston describes as an ‘ecological humanities’ must respond. Houston relays the importance of learning and observing the actions and organisational networks of social collectives and how they work to revitalise and remake their local and regional environments and similarly Emmett relays the importance of community gardening in realising environmental pedagogy. Assemblant methodologies in environmental education have been suggested by Law through ontological and performative ‘discovery and depiction of realities’, through engagements with environmental projects to develop ‘method-assemblages’. Houston demonstrates the benefits from skills-learning in environmental education, whereby “Environmental knowledges that are performed through such active and collective engagements show us that it is also the everyday and ordinary stuff that matters because it generates its own kind of complexity”. Specifically within the teaching of law, understanding us as part of an animal cartography whereby our sentience is not prioritised over any other creature, is the incorporation of animal welfare law into undergraduate law syllabuses, as discussed by de Almeida Silva regarding animal law education in Brazil. With this in mind, I recently have had the pleasure to come in to contact with two projects that express the post-correlationist, ecological, temporally nonlinear and alternative conception of environmental education I believe have the intrinsic tenets of speculative entropy at their heart, those being: Guattari-inspired ‘ecosophical’ project ‘Skill City’ of Henk Oosterling and Aetzel Griffioen in South Rotterdam, Netherlands; and the second example of speculative entropic practice in environmental law is the ‘lawscaping’ pedagogy of Andreas Phillippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ ‘Walking the Lawscape’. First we shall turn to Skill City. Skill City Inspired by the ‘ecosophy’ of Felix Guattari’s ‘The Three Ecologies’, philosopher and project executive Aetzel Griffioen describes Rotterdam’s ‘Skill City’ as “an ecosophical traject from primary school to vocational education with excluded neighbourhoods in the South of the city since 2007”. Designed within its mission