to moderate this year the United Nations General Assembly dialogue on

harmony with nature. The harmony with nature program was established as a

result of, or pursuant to, the General Assembly Resolution of 2009 that

recognised the 22nd of April as International Mother Earth Day. Mother

Earth is the somewhat incorrect translation or approximate translation

of an Indian concept the Pacha Mama 'the Divine Feminine'. This is the direct

result of a lineage of thought and of legal philosophy that has seen Earth as

not a mere collection of resources, not as a mere collection of objects. Earth is

seen as the holistic integrated sum of all the ecosystems within which humans

exist and upon which humans depend. Then the well-being of the system is

paramount to the continuous well-being of all of its members. A little bit over

ten years ago I discovered the emergence of what was then called Earth

jurisprudence and is now called by a number of scholars ecological

jurisprudence to move beyond the planetary boundary contained in the term

Earth. So we can see that this idea of nature conceived as a subject of rights

has been emerging in a number of jurisdictions at a pace that makes

an ecological jurisprudence the fastest growing legal movement of the 21st

century. To conceive of nature as a subject is quite a challenging

proposition. Who speaks on behalf of nature? Who is capable of representing or

even imagining what nature's interests are if they are even conceived of as

interest? Southern Cross University, in particular the School of Law and Justice

has been pursuing the emergence of an ecological jurisprudence for well over a

decade. In fact many colleagues have written extensively or participated in a

number of symposia, conferences and so on and so forth on the theme. The School of

Law and Justice has recently identified over 60% of its

research outputs as broadly categorized as falling within an ecological

jurisprudence which makes us, although a very small law school,

we're the school with the highest concentration of academics actively

researching in the field at least in Australia, and likely one of the highest

in the world.