RSS 1.0Arizona Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Volume 14, Special Issue (Symposium 2024)
ABOUT THIS COLLECTION
The Arizona Journal of Environmental Law & Policy (AJELP) is an interdisciplinary online publication that examines environmental issues from legal, scientific, economic, and public policy perspectives. This student-run journal publishes articles on a rolling basis with the intention of providing timely legal and policy updates of interest to the environmental community.
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Recent Submissions
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White Nationalist Parks, Eco-Fascism, and Conserving Global CapitalismThis article contextualizes fortress conservation as a violent system of green-colonialism that is rooted in eco-fascist ideology. Drawing upon the work of Aimé Césaire, I highlight how colonial capitalism is inherently fascistic, although prevailing historical narratives of the 20th and 21st century tend to obscure the fascist realities of settler colonial states such as the United States. With contradictions in capitalism rupturing through the crisis of climate/ecological disaster, our attention must also turn to the violence of eco-fascism as it has formed the environmental and conservationist policies of Western colonial powers, particularly in the creation of National Parks as intertwined with the concurring histories of removal, warfare and genocide. From tracing the early history of fortress conservation in the national building projects of settler colonial states, the article then turns to the militarized violence of imperialism and colonialism throughout the Global South in the contemporary management of fortress conservation projects, financed by Western aid development agencies and co-managed by ‘corporatised’ environmental NGOs. I argue that underpinning the Global North’s persistent interest in conservation parks is the ‘offshoring’ of global capitalism’s climate/biodiversity crisis into continued systems of colonialism, built upon the self-preservation of ecocidal capitalism and voyeuristic colonial desires for ‘untouched wilderness’ to whatever means necessary, normalizing the rise of eco-fascism in the West’s response to climate change. Campaigns against fortress conservation must work with strategic urgency to place pressure on Global South governments to halt evictions against Indigenous peoples, while also recognising the wider solidarity struggles to decarbonize, demilitarize, and ultimately to decolonize against the global extractivist economy of colonial capitalism - eager to outlive its day.
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Imagining Wilderness: The Wilderness Act's Sixty Years of Modern Indigenous DispossessionThe Wilderness Act of 1964 turns 60 in 2024. It preserves a problematic legacy of Indigenous dispossession in its core text, which seeks to manage designated wilderness lands “without permanent improvement or human habitation… [so that] the imprint of man’s work [is] substantially unnoticeable.” After discussion of the history of “wilderness” conservation strategies, which places their origins in the era of the United States’ ethnic cleansing of the land of its Indigenous stewards, the negative ecological and cultural impacts are analyzed in context of the limited flexibility of agencies to adapt the narrowly construed Act. The case of Big Cypress National Preserve, in which yet another study seeking to effect a wilderness designation has been proposed atop Miccosukee and Seminole Tribal reserved rights, will be discussed as a case study. After demonstrating that the Wilderness Act creates systemically inequitable outcomes for Indigenous peoples, a means forward, through amendment of the Wilderness Act to accommodate Native land rights, is proposed.
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Skewed Conservation Policy and the State Validation of Land Dispossession of Indgenous Peoples in KenyaProtected Areas are an existential threat to the existence and survival of the Indigenous Peoples of Kenya. From the colonial era to the present, Indigenous Peoples have had to endure a century of land and natural resources dispossession despite regime changes. It is agonizing to note that some areas currently occupied by indigenous peoples have been registered as government lands. Thus, the indigenous occupiers become squatters in lands they inherited from their ancestors and are possible subjects of violent evictions by Kenya Forest Service Rangers and Kenya Wildlife Service, who are the agents of government with the mandate to enforce conservation measures. Indigenous lands registered as protected areas were not subjected to free prior and informed consent (FPIC) nor were the Indigenous owners compensated as required by law. This note will demonstrate how some indigenous communities, through support from human rights lawyers and NGOs, have successfully litigated against such injustices. Still, the government of Kenya has remained unresponsive in implementing recommendations and judgments calling for the restitution of illegal land deprivation.This paper documents instances in which protected areas, created in lands overlapping with unceded Indigenous Peoples’ territories and forming part of ongoing and previous court litigations, have been targeted by the government to implement mega infrastructural projects and private ecotourism. This paper thus brings to the fore the irony of the government of Kenya using conservation to justify the deprivation and discrimination of Indigenous Peoples' right to property, development, and equality before the law.
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Foregrounding Human DignityThis article will unpack the conceptual causal link between pervasive indigenous peoples’ rights violations in Africa and implementation of protected areas legislation devoid of respect for human dignity as an interpretive principle to guide implementation of the laws in question. Specifically, I will examine the extent to which protected areas laws of six selected Southern and Eastern African countries namely Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda foster respect for human dignity as a means of protecting rights of indigenous communities. A key finding of this article is that most of the laws enacted to establish and manage protected areas in Eastern and Southern Africa are human-dignity blind. This is because, despite occasionally undergoing cosmetic amendments since the attainment of political independence, the laws in question are largely relics of colonialism. In order to establish the causal link and draw the above conclusion, I will first explore the legal foundations of human dignity as exemplified by the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and Constitutions of the six study jurisdictions. I will also look at the disproportional targeting of indigenous peoples in protected areas as documented in two reports submitted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to the UN General Assembly. Relatedly, I will address a central question namely who indigenous peoples are in the African setting, followed by a survey of protected areas legislation, juxtaposed with framework environmental laws of the six study jurisdictions. Lastly, I will explore the potential change of storylines or value addition of enshrining human dignity in protected areas legislation. This article recommends inclusion of provisions on human dignity as a global prescription for remedying both the historical and continued injustices and discriminatory practices against indigenous peoples in the context of protected areas establishment, management, and expansion.
