A conversation with Australian environmental lawyer and theorist Dr Bronwyn Lay, who currently works with climate litigation and legal rights for communities made vulnerable by climate change-related disasters. Known for her important work to help ecocide gain recognition in international courts together with Polly Higgins and Baltasar Garzón, she also has a background as a fire-fighter – or pompier – in France and as a philosopher with European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Her groundbreaking book, Juris Materiarium – Empires of Soils, Earth and Dirt (2016), explores law, the material foundations for life and our relation to nature. She combines direct experience on the ground in areas struck by disasters with theoretical reconsideration of national and international law, exploring its shaking foundations and deeper roots in a time of planet-wide climate change. With gigafires and floods, new uninhabitable zones have begun to appear and expand widening the gap between the state and its vulnerable inhabitants.