Principal speaker
Dr Sarah Keenan
Abstract
In the UK, the leafy and edible herbaceous perennial fallopia japonica or "Japanese Knotweed' strikes fear into the heart of every property owner. Legally classified as an "invasive alien species', it is an offence "to plant or otherwise cause Japanese knotweed to grow in the wild' and soil containing its rhizomes is "controlled waste' under the Environmental Protection Act 1990. In 2012, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors established a protocol whereby any property within 7 meters of knotweed growth was seen as being at risk of infestation, and soon after, banks stopped lending on properties in that risk category. A 2018 Court of Appeal decision found that the mere existence of Japanese Knotweed rhizomes, without causing any physical damage, amounted to the tort of private nuisance. Yet the House of Commons' own Science and Technology Committee reported in 2019 that "the physical damage to property from Japanese knotweed is no greater than that of other disruptive plants and trees' and that the plant rarely grows beyond three metres.
In this paper I ask what the political life of this plant can tell us about property in post-empire Britain, and more specifically, what it reveals about what is "natural' to English land. Taking the 2018 nuisance case as a point of departure, I trace the common law history of "things naturally on the land' deemed to interrupt the enjoyment of exclusive possession, and thus amount to nuisance. I find that such "natural things' came to be regarded as dangerous in the colonies, where "nature' generally was to be controlled and conquered. Engaging with feminist readings of the non-human and queer work on plant life, I argue that Japanese knotweed not only offers insights into how life and land might be understood and arranged differently from how we live in the Anthropocene, but also starts bringing those arrangements into being.
Biography
Sarah Keenan joined Birkbeck Law School in 2015, having previously held posts at SOAS and Oxford Brookes University. Sarah co-founded the Centre for Research on Race and Law and teaches across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate modules. She is presently co-director of Postgraduate Research.Event categories
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RSVP on or before Wednesday 20 April 2022 16.31 pm, by email lawfutures@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 0737355058
Event contact details
- Law Futures Centre
- 0737355058