Earth Jurisprudence: Making Nature a Subject Through Law Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Ariel Rawson, B.A. Graduate Program in Geography The Ohio State University 2015 Thesis Committee: Becky Mansfield, Advisor Kendra McSweeney Mathew Coleman Copyright by Ariel Rawson 2015 ABSTRACT ‘Rights for Nature’ is emerging as the hegemonic alternative to the ‘Green Economy,’ which since the 1990s has been the globally dominant approach to articulating the nexus between the crisis of development and the crisis of environment. ‘Rights for Nature’ juxtaposes the market-oriented logic of the Green Economy with the logic of legal personhood. The particular juridically oriented approach of extending legal personhood to non-human nature in the name of reconciling the society-nature dualism beyond the logic of profit presents an interesting contradiction. At the same time the logic of personhood purportedly offers a way to move beyond the modern relation to nature it is only through paradoxically depending on the fundamentally modern idea of rights that the logic becomes not only coherent but also inevitable and a morally good thing. By analyzing the problem, cause, and solution posed in ‘Rights for Nature’, I show that in this logic, life is simultaneously what is at stake in modernity’s dualisms and is the source of a non-dualistic resolution. ‘Rights for Nature’ paradoxically seeks to make humans more fully human (or realize their true humanity) in becoming more like nature (with the pre-social indigenous figure), and make nature something identifiably ‘natural’ in becoming more like humans (with legal personhood). Yet, by next analyzing the production of such a narrative, in terms of the relations between the speaking subject, the discursive site, and the statements, I show how the obfuscation of such a contradictory logic strategically depends upon particular epistemological tools. It is through the ii articulation of these tools that rights pose as themselves natural (in emerging from indigenous cosmologies and ecological holism) and therefore hide their relation to Western liberalism. At the same time this particular articulation also allows for Western liberalism to be posited as itself natural, and while it has produced a rift between the social and the natural, it is the natural realization of the rift itself that leads to its own suturing through rights. It is through this self-healing that the rift, as the ills/err of modernity’s human-nature dualism, can be just a part of the natural evolution of nature. iii VITA June 2008 ....................................................... Lowell High School May 2013 ....................................................... B.A. Interdisciplinary Studies, San Diego State University August 2014 to May 2015 ............................. Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University Fields of Study Major Field: Geography iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii VITA ................................................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY AND METHODS .............................................................. 13 CHAPTER 3: PROBLEM, CAUSE, & AND SOLUTION THE NARRATIVE ARC OF RIGHTS FOR NATURE .................................................................................................................. 28 The Problem: ............................................................................................................. 29 The Cause: ................................................................................................................. 34 The Solution: .............................................................................................................. 41 CHAPTER 4: WHO SPEAKS FOR THE TREES? NETWORK ANALYSIS OF ACTORS, SITES, AND INTERESTS .................................................................................................. 52 Alternative Development: .......................................................................................... 53 Western Holistic Environmentalism: ......................................................................... 73 Juridical-Legal: ......................................................................................................... 85 CHAPTER 5: THEMATIC PREMISES HOLISM, INDIGENEITY, SOVEREIGN ACTS ...... 104 Holistic Models of Life ............................................................................................ 105 Indigeneity: .............................................................................................................. 127 Role of Sovereign Acts ............................................................................................. 136 v CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 153 REFERENCES: ............................................................................................................... 155 vi Chapter 1: Introduction In 2013, the United Nations (UN) adopted its fifth resolution on “Harmony with Nature”, which calls for “holistic and integrated approaches to sustainable development that will guide humanity to live in harmony with nature and...restore the health and integrity of the earth’s ecosystems” by inviting states “to further build up a knowledge network“ that relies not only on “current scientific information” but also learns from “indigenous cultures” (General Assembly resolution 68/216 2013). The ‘Rights for Nature’ approach represented in this resolution is emerging as the hegemonic alternative to neoliberal market-environmentalism and the “green economy”. But as an alternative, this approach presents a series of paradoxes. In a series of documents and conferences over the past decade, ‘rights for nature’ is represented as not just a populist alternative, but as coming from nature herself and thus the only way in which the current aberration within the socionatural order can be corrected. Yet, it is the same self-referential voices, from the same places, and from the same organizations producing both the sensibility and visibility of this truth. Moreover, the content of the grassroots, the people, and indigeneity figure quite centrally in the narrative while it is the form of northern-turned- international organizations, juridical and academic institutional actors, and western environmentalist texts that provides both the means and the ends. For example, the 2013 UN resolution seamlessly cites as precedents both the Universal Declaration for the 1 Rights of Mother Earth (“UDRME” 2010) and the UN texts that underpin the emergence of the Green Economy, such as Agenda 21 (1992) and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (2002). That is, the UN resolution cites on the one hand the protest platform for the 35,000 people mobilizing against the neoliberal reconciliation between the environmental crisis and the crisis of development and, on the other hand, the exact documents that offer such reconciliation to which the protestors were reacting. This paradox shows, I argue, that this totalizing notion of ‘Rights for Nature’ does not reflect the natural realization of nature saving itself, but instead is the making universal of a particular—western juridical—norm. Western liberalism is supposed to solve the crisis of western liberalism, while drawing on ecological science and western ethics to position itself as arising from both the earth itself and indigenous cosmologies, which are seen, ultimately, to be the same thing. In setting up this context, I explain how the problematic of how to think about the interdependent relationship between environment (nature) and development (society) is the same problematic that animates both the rise of the green economy and the proliferation of other non-dualistic articulations of society-nature relations that are positioned (by themselves or others) as alternatives to the market-oriented reconciliation. However, non dualistic alternatives that conceptualize the logic of the neoliberal resolution between the environment and development as solely market- oriented, obscures how neoliberalism disrupts the public/private binary in ways that not only depend on the state (public) as much as they depend on the market (private), but, furthermore, in ways that mimic the non-dualistic logic of those ‘ways of knowing’ that are positioned as alternatives. This produces quite the dilemma for thinking through the 2 resulting power relations of such alternatives (if we take seriously that the market always needed the state as much as the state needed the market). Without exhausting the parameters of the various approaches, the rest of the introduction will set up this contextual framing through engaging Bakker’s (2008) examination of the society-nature relations mobilized and produced in the various efforts to think alternatives to the commodification of life itself. I lay out this engagement through a quick overview of the green economy, debates about rights, and the role of