Books

I contributed a short chapter to this inspiring and important book. (Edited by the brilliant Audrea Lim.)

https://theworldweneed.com/

The book features some amazing first-person stories from “America’s unsung environmental movement.” I really recommend checking it out! The chapter I wrote is about the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (which I work for) and efforts to “decolonize the law.” The chapter helped inspire an episode on the NPR-syndicated Climate One podcast. My colleague Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin (attorney and city councilor) joined Rebecca Tsosie (constitutional and Indigenous law scholar, who I interviewed for the chapter) on the podcast.

Link to podcast: https://www.climateone.org/audio/should-nature-have-rights

Rebecca: “For other Indigenous peoples, as well as the federally recognized tribes, the language of human rights insures that there is a consistency for national governments to recognize the unique status of Indigenous peoples, whether or not the government has crafted a special political status for them, they have human rights to land, ancestral territories, and [spiritual rights] — it is the only place in human rights law that talks about spiritual rights, that is not the same as religious rights. Spiritual rights are a different metaphysics, that attaches land and people through time, ancestors and future generations — so that metaphysics is built into Indigenous human rights and that is what we are protecting in some sense with this conversation about the Rights of Nature….The original law is still here, the people are still here, on the land, the land is the law in many ways, in this frame, because it designates the responsibilities that we have to care for it and that it has to us as long as we do those things. To decolonize thinking is what we have to do.”

Lindsey: “You don’t cover this stuff in law school. The whole first year of law school is about reasonableness, not justice.”