Journal of Law and Political Economy

Human activity is dramatically reducing global biodiversity. In response, legal decision-makers have deployed regulations aimed at minimizing the impact of the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s history. However, environmental law has recurrently failed to arrest rates of biodiversity loss. As such, legal scholars have proposed myriad reforms to overhaul the legal protection of biodiversity, ranging from introducing a crime of “ecocide” to granting legal personality to nonhumans. Yet there is a gap in the literature concerning the tendency of these novel proposals to reproduce the limitations of traditional methods. This article addresses that gap by critically reviewing the literature on the ontological tensions between Western-descended legal systems and the science of ecology. It argues that these tensions produce ecological “translation errors” within law that run deeper than is often acknowledged. The article concludes that increased skepticism—but not apathy—toward the legal form may be advantageous in confronting the biodiversity crisis.