ABSTRACT
Property law is increasingly faced with limits and changes arising from the environmental context. Ownership and, more generally, property law can no longer be considered in isolation from current environmental issues. The aim of this article is to highlight how property law can provide responses to environmental challenges by adapting several of its fundamental concepts to the polymorphism of environmental issues. Based on a study of the theoretical movements of biocentrism and ecocentrism, as well as the work of the American current of earth jurisprudence, this article suggests that while it is possible to consider Nature as a subject of legally protected interests, it is also appropriate to reconceptualise ownership/property and its narrative to see it, both in civil law and in common law, as limited, relational and (poly)functional. Ownership could then be described as a an exclusivity relation related to property, including some internal limits in the form of duties or obligations linked to the belonging to a community shaped by collective interests. In addition, the concept of patrimony can be called upon, in its symbolic and technical function, to protect the environment.
Emerich, Yaell, Property for Nature (January 1, 2023).
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