Book review: Nature et souveraineté

"Nature et Souveraineté." Gérard Mairet. SciencesPo. April 2012. --- In this short text, Gérard Mairet suggests some leads for a new political philosophy at a time of environmental crisis. He aims to demonstrate how the concept of sovereignty can be rethought in view of that crisis, bearing in mind that huge areas of the world environment elude all sovereignty: the atmosphere, the high seas, the Arctic. Mairet shows that by focusing exclusively on what supposedly makes humans distinctive, political theorists have failed to deal with the essential ethical questions: whether nature has rights over humans and humans have the right to fulfill their basic biological needs, writes Melanie Conroy.