Replacing Rights with Indigenous Relationality to Reclaim Homelands

Indigenous peoples have had and continue to have contested relations with protected spaces of nature, many of which nation states have carved from Indigenous homelands and waters. Usually in the name of the common good, governments and their officials prohibit or limit Native peoples from exercising their rights in these spaces. This gives rise to conflicts and tensions that emerge from a Western rights framework that white settlers and elites have used to prioritize the rights of nature over Indigenous peoples. This chapter seeks to provide some historical context for the way that three problematic and closely related “white-settler social constructs”—wilderness, preservation, and the ecological Indian—came to shape the emergence and management of protected spaces of nature, particularly under a Western rights framework. Overall, the chapter argues that a relationality framework offers an Indigenous-based counterpoint to the rights framework, in which white settlers and elites privilege the rights of nature over those of Native peoples.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

California’s Environmental Policy Leadership

California is a long-standing role leader in environmental regulation in the United States. Wilderness preservation and restrictions on coastal oil drilling began in California, as did the regulation of pollution from automobiles. More recently, California has played a prominent role in addressing the risks of global climate change through its programs promoting energy efficiency and renewable energy and its restrictions on greenhouse emissions from motor vehicles. The state has also been highly active in regulating chemicals. Many of California’s environmental regulations have been adopted by other states as well as by the federal government. However, because the United States is a federal system, its regulations have also brought the state into frequent conflict with the Trump administration.

Morals, intuitions, culture, and identity-based theories

The theories within this section move beyond bounded rationality to incorporate a wider array of situations common to our daily lives. Most of the decisions we make on a daily basis don’t involve deep cognitive thought. We rather rely on our intuitions, or gut feelings, to guide us. Moreover, when we feel threatened or our intuitive predispositions are challenged, it commonly proves difficult to calmly evaluate information and make rational decisions. Debates about environmental regulation, climate change, wilderness preservation, and resource extraction, among many others, often trigger deep-seated emotions and defensive reactions, rather than reasoned exchanges. The theories within this section explain why and how this happens and provide strategies for what to do about it, drawing on themes of morals, intuitions, culture, and identity. Each theory is summarized succinctly and followed by guidance on how to apply it to real world problem solving.

Proposed Release of Wilderness Study Areas in Montana (USA) Would Demote the Conservation Status of Nationally-Valuable Wildlands

Wildlands are increasingly lost to human development. Conservation scientists repeatedly call for protecting the remaining wildlands and expanding the land area protected in reserves. Despite these calls, conservation reserves can be eliminated through legislation that demotes their conservation status. For example, legislation introduced to the Congress of the United States recently would demote 29 Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) from the protections afforded by their existing status. The legislation suggests that the 29 areas are not suitable for a promotion and future inclusion in the National Wilderness Preservation System based on decades-old local evaluations. Local evaluations, notwithstanding, it may be important to consider the value of lands from a national perspective. Without a national perspective, local evaluations alone may overlook the national significance of lands. With this in mind, I used five qualities of wildland value (wildness, light pollution, noise pollution, intactness of mammals, and intactness mammal carnivores of conservation concern) to compare the 29 WSAs to all national parks and wilderness areas located within the contiguous United States. The pool of 29 WSAs were similar to the pool of national parks and wilderness with respect to the five qualities assessed, and some of the WSAs were characterized by higher values than most of national parks and wilderness areas. This analysis demonstrates the national significance of the WSAs targeted for conservation status demotion. Such an approach could be used in future land management legislation and planning to ensure that a national perspective on conservation value is brought to bear on decisions facing federally-managed lands.

Conditionality, Non-Self, and Non-Attachment in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide: A Buddhist Reading

This article approaches Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide from the perspective of Buddhist philosophy. It argues that the Buddhist notions of impermanence (anicca), non-self (anattā) and conditionality (iddappaccayatā) are evident in the novel’s portrayal of the physical reality of the Sundarbans. These principles are also at work in the novel’s representation of the social realm of ideologies, identities and human interactions. As Western environmentalism, to which the female protagonist is attached, is subject to the law of conditionality, the novel critiques the blind attempt to impose the Western ideology of wilderness preservation upon marginalized locals in India and highlights other forms of environmental ideologies. The novel also depicts the interaction between those from the metropolitan center with locals which transcends the postcolonial framework of power struggles and which is instead based on a shared sense of humanity, emphasizing specific conditions that give rise to the interactions. Moreover, the article discusses how the Sundarbans and various factors in the protagonists’ lives and interactions with the locals play a crucial role in prompting them to realize the slipperiness of what they perceive as their identities. Finally, the narrative in the novel itself orchestrates the workings of the law of conditionality and impermanence, trying to inculcate an attitude of non-attachment. As an embodiment of the afore-mentioned Buddhist concepts, The Hungry Tide serves as an expedient means to disrupt one’s tendency to cling to certain views or perceptions of reality and to offer an alternative approach to human interactions which entails open-minded tolerance of difference.