Legal Rights for Whose Nature?

Abstract

In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60 U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community’s right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights.

本文探讨新的基于权利的环境治理—自然的权利（RoN）。RoN旨在把对自然的看法, 从财产转变为生存权不受损害的实体。支持者认为, RoN是一种范式转变, 它重构了不平衡的人与自然等级关系。我们收集了美国60多个实施RoN法令社区的数据, 审视了这个看法。在美国定居者殖民背景下, 我们的分析确定了再次出现的三个主题：自然权利与社区健康环境权的共建、对自治和社区赋权的重视、实施RoN法令的定居者社区的压倒性白人比例。我们将这些主题与批判性种族研究相结合起来, 评估了自由主义权力法律体系的种族化影响。研究了在美国定居者殖民背景下, RoN如何通过推动西方白人的法权自由主义概念, 以解决当前的环境危机。从批判种族研究的角度去分析这些主题, 我们认为, 以RoN法令为形式的基于权利的环境治理, 似乎巩固了利用普世权利主张去重塑白人自由主义的许多固有社会、法律和环境关系。

En este artículo exploramos los derechos de la naturaleza (RoN) como una gobernanza ambiental emergente basada en derecho que intenta volver a enmarcar la naturaleza de la propiedad en una entidad que se juega el derecho a existir desarmada. Quienes la proponen sostienen que se trata de un cambio de paradigma que reelabora la jerarquía fuera de balance de la relación seres humanos-naturaleza. Interrogamos esta pretensión usando datos recogidos entre más de 60 comunidades de los EE. UU. donde las ordenanzas de los RoN ya han sido implementadas. Nuestro análisis identifica tres temas recurrentes dentro del contexto colonial americano de pobladores, incluyendo una coconstitución de los derechos de la naturaleza junto con el derecho de la comunidad a disponer de un entorno saludable, el énfasis de la autogobernanza y el empoderamiento individual comunitario, y el indisputable dominio de la blancura en las comunidades de pobladores que implementan las leyes sobre los RoN. Llevamos estos temas a conversación con la erudición crítica de raza, que evalúa los impactos racializados de un sistema liberal legal de los derechos, para examinar cómo, dentro del contexto colonial de los pobladores americanos, los RoN movilizan las concepciones liberales blancas de Occidente de los derechos legales para enfrentar las crisis ambientales que nos aquejan actualmente. Al analizar estos temas a través de la lente de la erudición crítica de raza, sostenemos que la gobernanza ambiental basada en derechos, en la forma de normas de los RoN, parece reforzar muchos de las relaciones de arraigo ambientales-legales-sociales, que caracterizan el liberalismo blanco proyectado a través de un lenguaje que reivindica derechos universales.

Key Words:

• environmental governance
• environmental politics
• nature–society relations
• race and law
• rights of nature

关键词:

• 环境治理
• 环境政治
• 自然与社会关系
• 种族与法律
• 自然的权利。

Palabras clave:

• derechos de la naturaleza
• gobernanza ambiental
• política ambiental
• raza y ley
• relaciones naturaleza—sociedad

Acknowledgments

This article benefited from engagements with scholars participating in the Humanities in the Environment program with the University of Texas Humanities Institute. Thank you to the program’s fellows who provided insightful comments and sharp feedback. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editor for their feedback in support in this project. Any errors are our own.

Notes

1 Women gained the right to vote in 1920 with the U.S. Constitution’s Nineteenth Amendment. Further, although it was common practice that women were included within the definition of “person” laid out in the Fourteenth Amendment at the dawn of the twentieth century, this was not codified by the Supreme Court until 1971 with the case Reed v. Reed (Tevis 1981). The United States Indian Act of 1942 granted rights to Indigenous peoples. This is a complicated history, and in many respects legal personhood remains incomplete for this group (Whyte 2018). In 1924 the League of Nations countries adopted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, emphasizing a child’s right to be protected. In the Supreme Court ruling In re Gault (1967), U.S. children were granted the same due process rights held by adults under the Fourteenth Amendment. It remains, however, that U.S. children do not hold the full set of personhood rights that an adult might access (Earls 2011). The disability movement in the United States in the 1960s is widely credited with establishing an expanded set of rights for disabled persons, although this expansion might not be as full as what able-bodied adults enjoy and will vary depending on individual circumstances (Scotch 2009).

2 In 2020, attorney Thomas Linzey, a cofounder of CELDF, broke ties with the organization and started the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, his own legal rights advocacy group in Spokane, Washington. Through this group, Linzey and his team engage communities in much the same way as CELDF, working to enact local RoN laws.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Kohl

ELLEN KOHL is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary’s City, MD 20686. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are at the intersections of race, environmental policy, and place. She uses intersectionality to examine environmental governances and the perpetuation of environmental injustices.

Jayme Walenta

JAYME WALENTA is a feminist economic geographer in the Department of Geography & Environment, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research investigates intersections between capitalism and the law, particularly as it concerns environmental policymaking and its spatial justice implications.