Can Nature Have Rights? Legal and Political Insights
The authors of this volume explore the potential value and challenges of the Rights of Nature concept by examining legal theory, politics, and recent case studies.
The authors of this volume explore the potential value and challenges of the Rights of Nature concept by examining legal theory, politics, and recent case studies.
Berros describes some of the first cases in which Rights of Nature was directly referenced in the courts of Ecuador.
Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Sandrina de Finney, and Mindy Blaise edit and introduce a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism.” The three essays that follow ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognizant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project.
In this article for a special section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Lesley Instone and Affrica Taylor engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo relate raccoon-child-educator encounters to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and the perception of raccoons as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. They do so through a series of situated, everyday stories from childcare centers in Canada.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
Kamaljit Kaur Sangha and Jeremy Russell-Smith propose an integrated ecosystem services (ES) valuation framework for an indigenous savanna estate in northern Australia, describing how capabilities along with biophysical and socio-cultural ES benefits play a vital role for peoples’ well-being.
Sudeep Jana Thing, Roy Jones, and Christina Birdsall Jones investigate the recent participatory turn in nature conservation policy and practices through an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of the marginalised Sonaha (indigenous people of the Bardia region) in relation to the conservation discourses, policies, and practices of the Bardia National Park authorities in the Nepalese lowland.
In this Special Section on the Green Economy in the South, Stasja Koot and Walter van Beek argue that a Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) program in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, with a strong focus on tourism, has dominated and changed the environment of the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen.
Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya draws attention to the persistent justice debates in Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus the enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) and the role of norms in constraining and shaping policy designs and outcomes.