This book re-imagines law as ecolaw. The key insight of ecological thinking, that everything is connected to everything else – at least on the earth, and possibly in the cosmos – has become a truism of contemporary theory. Taking this insight as a starting point for understanding law involves suspending theoretical certainties and boundaries. It involves suspending theory itself as a conceptual project and practicing it as an embodied and material project. Although an ecological imagining of law can be metaphorical, and can be highly imaginative and suggestive, this book shows that it is also literal. Law is part of the material ‘everything’ that is connected to everything else. This means that once the previous certainties of legal thinking have been dismantled, it is after all possible to think of law as ‘natural’ – as embedded in and emergent from a normative biophysical nature. The book proposes that there exists a natural nomos: animals, plants, and Earth systems that produce their own values and norms from which human norms and laws emerge. This book, then, proposes a new way to understand law, and pursues specific arguments to demonstrate the feasibility of law as ecolaw. Drawing inspiration from current trends in the post-humanities, socioecological thought, and developments across the natural sciences in their specific intersections with humanities and social science disciplines, this book will appeal both to legal theorists and to others with interests in these areas.

Winner, IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award in Politics/Current Events: A systems theorist and a legal scholar present a new paradigm for protecting our planet. This is the first book to trace the fascinating parallel history of law and science from antiquity to modern times, showing how the two disciplines have always influenced each other—until recently. In the past few decades, science has shifted from seeing the natural world as a kind of cosmic machine best understood by analyzing each cog and sprocket to a systems perspective that views the world as a vast network of fluid communities and studies their dynamic interactions. The concept of ecology exemplifies this approach. But law is stuck in the old mechanistic paradigm: The world is simply a collection of discrete parts, and ownership of these parts is an individual right, protected by the state. Fritjof Capra, physicist, systems theorist, and bestselling author of The Tao of Physics, and distinguished legal scholar Ugo Mattei show that this obsolete worldview has led to overconsumption, pollution, and a general disregard on the part of the powerful for the common good. Capra and Mattei outline the basic concepts and structures of a legal order consistent with the ecological principles that sustain life on Earth that better addresses many of the economic and social crises we face today. This is a visionary reconceptualization of the very foundations of the Western legal system, a kind of Copernican revolution in the law, with profound implications for the future of our planet. “Thoughtful . . . The authors propose a philosophy and jurisprudence that is deeply radical—upending centuries of Western tradition and culture—but possibly crucial to solving looming environmental problems.” —Publishers Weekly

Despite the nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, a growing number of countries are interested in expanding or introducing nuclear energy. However, nuclear energy production and nuclear waste disposal give rise to pressing ethical questions that society needs to face. This book takes up this challenge with essays by an international team of scholars focusing on the key issues of risk, justice, and democracy. The essays consider a range of ethical issues, including radiological protection, the influence of gender in the acceptability of nuclear risk, and environmental, international, and intergenerational justice in the context of nuclear energy. They also address the question of when, and under which conditions, nuclear energy should play a role in the world's future supply of electricity, looking at both developing and industrialized countries. The book will interest readers in ethics and political philosophy, social and political sciences, nuclear engineering, and policy studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Software Engineering for Resilient Systems, SERENE 2011, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in September 2011. The 13 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address all aspects of formal modeling and verification, architecting resilient systems, fault tolerance, requirements engineering and product lines, monitoring and self-adaption, and security and intrusion avoidance.

This book represents the combined peer-reviewed proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing - IDC-2013, of the Second Workshop on Agents for Clouds - A4C-2013, of the Fifth International Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems Technology and Semantics - MASTS-2013, and of the International Workshop on Intelligent Robots - iR-2013. All the events were held in Prague, Czech Republic during September 4-6, 2013. The 41 contributions published in this book address many topics related to theory and applications of intelligent distributed computing and multi-agent systems, including: agent-based data processing, ambient intelligence, bio-informatics, collaborative systems, cryptography and security, distributed algorithms, grid and cloud computing, information extraction, intelligent robotics, knowledge management, linked data, mobile agents, ontologies, pervasive computing, self-organizing systems, peer-to-peer computing, social networks and trust, and swarm intelligence.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Environments for Multiagent Systems, E4MAS 2014 - 10 years later, held in Paris, France, in May 2014 as an associated event of AAMAS 2014, the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. The 6 revised full papers presented together with 1 roadmap paper and 7 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on connecting agents, environments, and humans; environments for complex and stigmergic systems; virtual and simulated environments; and open agent environments and interoperability.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, COORDINATION 2015, held as part of the 10th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2015, in Grenoble, France, in June 2015. The 14 full papers and one short paper presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. They are organized in topical sections on tuple-based coordination, coordinating ensembles, constraints, agent-oriented techniques and shared spaces.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, COORDINATION 2017, held in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, in June 2017, as part of the 12th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques, DisCoTec 2017. The 13 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and techniques related to system coordination, including: languages and tools; types; resource, components and information flow; verification.

Web services provide systems with great flexibility and easier maintenance which result in better ways to communicate and distribute applications. There are good procedures in place for the design, development, and management of Web services; however, there are areas in which Web service adaptation is required. To preserve the loosely coupled approach of Web services, service adaptations should be implemented appropriately. Adaptive Web Services for Modular and Reusable Software Development: Tactics and Solutions includes current research on the area of Web service adaptation while embarking upon the different aspects related to Web services. This collection provides an overview of existing solutions for service adaption in different development scopes as well as covers a wide variety of challenges which emerge. It aims to keep industry professionals as well as academic researchers up to date with the latest research results.

As the complexity of today’s networked computer systems grows, they become increasingly difficult to understand, predict, and control. Addressing these challenges requires new approaches to building these systems. Adaptive, Dynamic, and Resilient Systems supplies readers with various perspectives of the critical infrastructure that systems of networked computers rely on. It introduces the key issues, describes their interrelationships, and presents new research in support of these areas. The book presents the insights of a different group of international experts in each chapter. Reporting on recent developments in adaptive systems, it begins with a survey of application fields. It explains the requirements of such fields in terms of adaptation and resilience. It also provides some abstract relationship graphs that illustrate the key attributes of distributed systems to supply you with a better understanding of these factors and their dependencies. The text examines resilient adaptive systems from the perspectives of mobile, infrastructure, and enterprise systems and protecting critical infrastructure. It details various approaches for building adaptive, dynamic, and resilient systems—including agile, grid, and autonomic computing; multi-agent-based and biologically inspired approaches; and self-organizing systems. The book includes many stories of successful applications that illustrate a diversified range of cutting-edge approaches. It concludes by covering related topics and techniques that can help to boost adaptation and resilience in your systems.