Abstract
The past 10 years have witnessed a flourishing of interdisciplinary research across the social sciences that aims to better theorize the relationships between structural racism and the deepening ecological crisis. In this article, I consider how grassroots lawyers and community activists for the ‘rights of nature’ (RoN) in the United States are transforming their discourses, legal tactics, and pedagogical strategies in the face of a national context marked by pervasive anti-Black racism. After considering how racism has historically accompanied efforts to extend moral and legal ‘personhood’ to ecosystems in ways that continue to make solidarity work with racial justice organizations vexed and difficult, I show that, despite these exclusionary legacies, RoN activists are experimenting with municipal law-making in ways that are bringing them into closer conversation with contemporary racial justice struggles. Instead of focusing narrowly on the problem of the denial of ‘rights’ to non-humans, RoN activists are increasingly concerned with the broader structural problem of state pre-emption over local decision-making and the profoundly anti-democratic nature of a state/corporate nexus that is limiting possibilities for progressive action across a wide range of justice issues. Whilst these legal experiments do not resolve enduring tensions between anti-racist and environmental struggles, they suggest important re-directions taking place among historically white environmental activists.
Introduction
Over the past few years, the mainstream U.S. environmental movement has intensified their reckoning with structural and institutional racism within the movement. From the Sierra Club and Greenpeace to Friends of the Earth, large environmental organizations have acknowledged their ongoing complicity with the positioning of racial justice struggles as somehow secondary to more pressing environmental concerns. The murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 was only the most recent catalyst for these ongoing processes of transformation. In the months following his murder, some of the more radically eco-centric grassroots organizations such as the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) sought to go even further than their ‘Big Green’ counterparts – committing themselves to a more thorough-going anti-racist praxis, endorsing the Movement for Black Lives, and promising to more actively transform the movement’s long-standing reluctance to center social justice issues. However, despite the growing recognition among both scholars and activists of the importance of more ‘deeply intersectional’ approaches to addressing environmental challenges at multiple scales (Malin and Ryder, 2018; Bell and Bevan, 2021; Hultgren, 2015), and despite growing calls among social and political theorists for better attending to the intersecting crises of racial injustice and environmental collapse (Fraser, 2021), there remains surprisingly little empirical work on how white grassroots environmental organizations are seeking to transform their organizing strategies in light of what Laura Pulido and her colleagues have called the ‘spectacular racism’ of the contemporary ‘White supremacy-scene’ (Pulido et al., 2019; Mirzoeff, 2018). More specifically, there is little ethnographic investigation of the ongoing processes of transformation by which organizations historically committed to the ‘deepest green’ parts of the movement (Alberro, 2020) are being transformed by the epidemic of anti-Black racism that has been particularly visible in the United States over at least the last decade.
In this article, I consider how lawyers and community activists associated with CELDF – the leading U.S.-based organization focused on advancing the so-called ‘rights of nature’ – are beginning to transform their understandings of the core problems facing the environmental movement in response to anti-Black violence and highly visible acts and assertions of white supremacy. CELDF is a not-for-profit public interest law firm in the state of Pennsylvania that is leading the call for the rights of nature in the United States. As is by now well-known, the movement for the rights of nature is a movement that seeks to extend rights and/or legal personhood to non-human beings, entities, and ecosystems, including most successfully rivers and lakes in the United States, Aotearoa/New Zealand, India, Ecuador, Canada, Colombia, and elsewhere (Kauffman and Martin, 2018; O’Donnell and Talbot, 2018; Winter 2019). In the United States, one of the primary rationales for this movement – initially articulated by American lawyer Christopher Stone in the 1970s – was that it was only by giving ‘rights’ to nature that ecosystems would have standing in court. Without these rights, Stone argued, no one who was not directly affected by environmental pollution or other forms of environmental destruction would have the standing to challenge state and corporate prerogatives in U.S. courts (Stone, 1972). Some 40 years later, in the context of the rapidly deepening climate crisis alongside an equally challenging crisis of corporate ‘personhood’ in the United States (Fitz-Henry, 2018; Kirsch, 2014), Stone’s ideas have acquired a second life among scholars influenced by post-humanism and post-materialism, lawyers of earth jurisprudence and legal pluralism, and leading activist organizations, including Movement Rights and the Earth Law Center in the United States, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature in Ecuador, and the Australian Earth Laws Alliance in Australia.
While much has been written about this now-global movement (Burdon and Maloney, 2014; Tanasescu, 2015; Kaufmann and Martin, 2021; Fitz-Henry, 2020, 2021), to date scholars have not focused specifically on how these rights might sit alongside, intersect with, or amplify the rights struggles of racialized communities (with the important exception of First Nations communities) in settler-colonial contexts marked by pervasive white supremacy. This is a noticeable omission because, as scholars of environmental justice have long pointed out, these are the communities who often bear the brunt of the most lethal forms of rights violations (Pellow, 2016; Kojola and Pellow, 2020; Hage, 2016). To begin to better understand how these disproportionately white grassroots rights of nature (RoN) groups are contending with and being transformed by the anti-Black violence that continues to characterize life in the contemporary United States, this article asks: How are these ecological rights being understood, implemented, and ultimately transformed by U.S. lawyers and activists at this time when Black communities remain under such sustained assault at the hands of law enforcement? How are these lawyers thinking about how to push for the rights of nature in ways that do not inadvertently continue the legacies of racial exclusion that have historically marked deep green movements (Salleh 1993; Wernick 2020)? How are they differently operationalizing these rights as part of their evolving responses to a national context in which efforts to render ecological systems as either ‘persons’ or ‘right-holders’ are constrained by systems that still treat far too many human communities as either ‘non-persons’ or lacking the same de facto rights as white settlers (Inwood, 2015; Inwood et al., 2020)?
To explore these questions, I focus on three organizing strategies used by CELDF between approximately 2012–2021. Bringing ethnographic and theoretical attention to bear on these shifting and sometimes overlapping strategies, I illustrate how activists’ conceptions of their work, their articulation of the primary obstacles facing the institutionalization of more robust forms of environmental protection, and their discursive and tactical efforts to drive the rights of nature into law have evolved in fundamental ways over the past 10 years. To briefly summarize the argument that follows: The longer these lawyers and activists have engaged in this work the more they have come to explicitly name and theorize white supremacy, foregrounding the social and institutional legacies of settler-colonialism in ways that are driving novel strategies of defense for local ecosystems. My contention in this article is that these tactical and ideological transformations are deserving of significantly further engagement by a wider range of environmental political theorists and critical geographers concerned with how racial discrimination is both limiting progressive environmental action and fueling the rise of environmentally regressive policymaking (Mascarenhas, 2020).
There are three primary reasons that attention to the work of organizations like CELDF strikes me as particularly urgent. First, because pronounced anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and anti-Indigenous racism continues to be a major driver of right-wing populist parties in both the U.S. and Europe that maintain environmentally regressive policies that are among the least conducive to the flourishing of the rights of nature. Understanding how grassroots organizations such as CELDF are seeking to challenge racism in the American context may prove important to developing broader strategies to counteract the further extension of environmentally destructive right-wing nationalism, particularly among white rural communities. Second, because environmental activists in many parts of the Global North, with some important exceptions, have recently been critiqued for continuing to rely on implicitly white frameworks and organizing strategies that often subject people of color to increased surveillance and police violence (see, for example, Bell and Bevan 2021; Bell 2021). Better understanding efforts on the ground to bring racial justice concerns into some of the most historically white parts of the environmental movement, as represented by CELDF, is work that will likely be essential to both framing and meeting environmental challenges in ways that do not replicate the racism of earlier efforts at environmental protection or inadvertently alienate communities that might potentially be powerful allies. And third, because as a small but growing number of scholars are beginning to recognize, right-wing eco-fascist groups are on the rise both in Europe and the United States – groups that are often attracted to the ‘deepest green’ parts of the environmental movement because of their assumed whiteness and commitment to the protection of land (‘territory’ or ‘homeland’), while at the same time appropriating and redirecting those commitments into anti-Black and anti-immigrant programs that have found growing support among voters across the OECD countries (Taylor, 2016). Attention to the ways that white eco-centric groups such as CELDF are beginning to address issues of racial justice is particularly timely in the face of a growing number of Alt-right groups in the U.S. who are actively engaged in the co-optation of eco-centric tropes to justify their anti-immigrant sentiment (Hultgren, 2017). To ensure that potentially transformative legal innovations like the rights of nature are not repurposed for racist and regressive ends, there is much that can be learned from grassroots efforts to advance the work of more robust multi-racial coalitions that center a range of contemporary racial justice struggles.
The research on which this article was based forms part of a larger transnational project on the rights of nature in Ecuador, the United States, and Australia, and it draws on insights garnered from across those locations. While much of this research has been ethnographic in nature, this article is based primarily on discourse analysis of CELDF’s media reports, training materials, book publications, website posts, and webinars. These materials are augmented by data from interviews with key CELDF lawyers and activists, and participant-observation conducted between 2018-2020 during short periods of on-site research in the states of Ohio and Washington as well as follow-up interviews by phone, Zoom, and email. It is also informed by my attendance at a Community Rights Workshop in Bowling Green, Ohio in February 2018. The ethnographic data that I present in this article is focused primarily on Ohio-based organizers who are operating in a state context that is both powerfully shaped by the shale gas boom that began in the early 2010s and over-determined by a particularly hostile Republican-dominated state legislature. However, the strategic shifts documented throughout are taking place across the organization more broadly and in many different states, from New England to the Pacific Northwest, as CELDF seeks to transform itself into a more explicitly ‘decolonial’ organization rooted in a fuller recognition of law’s fundamental embeddedness in ‘white supremacy and colonization’ (CELDF, 2023).
The discussion is organized as follows: In the first section, I introduce the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) before briefly considering theoretical debates about the implicit racism of rights frameworks and the cultural essentialism that has sometimes underpinned claims for the rights of nature. In the second, I narrow in on three organizing strategies used by CELDF activists over the period from approximately 2012–2021 that sought in different ways to articulate points of shared struggle, strategy, and vision with racial justice movements, both historic and contemporary. In the third, I draw out the implications of this evolution to suggest that while this grassroots labor should not be seen as somehow empirically reconciling the sorts of critiques of the racist exclusions of rights discourses that I outline in the first section, the work of CELDF raises important questions about how both scholars and activists might more fully engage the intersections of white supremacist violence and state-facilitated extraction.
Racism and the rights of nature?
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is a Pennsylvania-based not-for-profit legal organization that first pioneered the work of extending rights to nature in the US in the mid-2000s. Like many other environmental organizations, it is staffed almost entirely by people who identify as white. Founded by white environmental lawyers concerned with empowering local communities to protect ecosystems from a range of corporate projects, CELDF arrived at a rights-based strategy after years of finding themselves caught in the institutional crosshairs of an environmental regulatory system that did not allow them to effectively halt large-scale industrial projects like natural gas extraction, sludge dumping, and factory farming. As a result of repeatedly failed engagements with the regulatory system, what had begun as a relatively mainstream environmental law firm transitioned to becoming one of the most radically eco-centric organizations in the country, advocating for what they call the ‘rights of nature.’ As former director Mari Margil explained in 2012, what their organization ended up doing in the early years was simply ultimately helping large companies, since they spent their time identifying errors with the environmental permits which the companies then fixed, happily thanked CELDF, and went on with their business of factory farming, sludge dumping, or natural gas extraction. Seeking to legally empower communities to say no to these projects, CELDF began to work with municipalities to pass local legislation that both enshrines so-called rights for ecosystems and, more controversially, revokes corporate rights within city limits. A taste of this approach can be seen in the 2019 Lake Erie Bill of Rights drafted by CELDF, which was widely lauded both nationally and internationally before being struck down by a judge in Ohio in February 2020 (Davis-Cohen and O’Dell, 2021). The bill states: “Lake Erie, and the Lake Erie watershed, possess the right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve…Any corporation or government that violates any provision of this law shall be guilty of an offense and, upon conviction thereof, shall be sentenced to pay the maximum fine allowable under State law for that violation” (LEBOR, 2019). Similar charter amendments have been passed in more than 200 municipalities across the country, and in many cases, they have already been directly challenged by both state governments and affected corporations in U.S. courts. While the scholarship on these efforts is robust and growing (see, for example, Tanasescu, 2015; Youatt, 2020; Kauffman and Martin, 2021; Fitz-Henry, 2018, 2021), there has thus far been little attention to the specific organizing tactics and strategies used by these activists in the United States.
This is a serious omission because, as noted above, pointed critiques have been raised in recent years in relation to movements for the rights of nature – specifically, about the ways in which racism of various kinds remains embedded in the architecture of rights languages, both implicitly and explicitly. There are two such critiques that are particularly worth flagging in this context. The first, raised most prominently by human geographers Ariel Rawson and Becky Mansfield, is that conceptions of both legal personhood and rights in the Western tradition have historically been premised on a certain very limited subject: the white, property-owning male. As Rawson and Mansfield note: “The rights-bearing citizen was founded on notions of property, in which personhood rights were based on sovereign possession of oneself; although originally founded on limited recognition of sovereign persons as white, straight, property-owning men, an enduring strategy of colonial technologies of governance has been to expand the sphere of recognition to incorporate new subjects” (Rawson and Mansfield, 2018: 105). The argument here – one that has, in various forms, long been made by critics not just of the rights of nature, but of human rights more broadly – is that the language of ‘rights’ was always constituted by a series of racist exclusions, including of enslaved and Indigenous peoples who were seen as fundamentally lacking full personhood and otherwise not conforming to the vision of the universal bearer of rights. As legal scholars Anna Grear and Elena Blanco have similarly noted, challenging the oft-repeated liberal narrative about the progressive expansion of legal personhood to include those historically excluded: It remains essential not to underestimate the traction of Eurocentric, rationalistic assumptions underwriting law and legal personhood. Even when new forms of legal person are generated, there is nothing to guarantee immunity from the continuing ideological traction of law’s well-rehearsed patterns of privilege and predation…Neither the universal human of human rights nor the legal person have ever cast off a centripetal tendency towards an intrinsically Eurocentric construct prioritizing the putatively rational, property owning, white male (Grear and Blanco, 2019: 99).
In the view of these authors, to extend the notion of legal ‘personhood’ to include non-humans is merely to extend the colonial impulse that was initially constitutive of the so-called Rights of Man, thereby replicating an inherently exclusionary imaginary that has historically not stopped many of the most serious abuses of marginalized communities, either human or other-than-human.
A second and related critique is that these rights often rely for their power on the mobilization of what political scientist Mihnea Tanasescu has called, ‘the Indigenous symbol.’ While drawing on thoroughly Western juridical frameworks, rights for nature have often been constructed by white advocates in strategically essentialist ways – that is, as somehow inherently aligned with ‘Indigenous values,’ which are very broadly conceived and often without sufficient attention to the vast diversity of such values. The argument that these rights are somehow Indigenous, or introduce Indigenous conceptions and approaches into Western law, is an argument that has been made repeatedly by founding scholars of the RoN movement such as South African lawyer Cormic Cullinan, who has suggested that they represent an important approximation of what has long been known in Indigenous communities about the importance of care-taking networks of kinship relations with both humans and other-than-humans (Cullinan, 2002). Key supporters of this framing, such as Ecuador’s Alberto Acosta – a prominent advocate of the rights of nature in Ecuador and former Minister of Mines and Energy – have even argued that their intellectual origins can be “traced to the ancestral oral traditions of…indigenous communities” and that “these rights translate indigenous philosophy [albeit imperfectly] and an indigenous way of life that respects the ontological equality of nature and already sees it as a subject” (Tanasescu, 2015: 114). While there are important truths to these claims, and indeed, there are numerous Indigenous nations in the United States which have begun to embrace the language of rights for nature alongside (and as a way of bolstering) sovereignty claims, this is an argument that too often depends on problematically essentialized constructions of Indigenous ‘others.’ As Tanasescu explains: Nature’s advocates in the [Ecuadorian] Constitutional Assembly claimed that nature is a subject, and in order for it to be treated as such rights should be granted. In order to make the point, they employed the indigenous symbol, arguing that the indigenous way of life already shows what a nature with rights is like. However, the indigenous way of life cannot possibly show what a nature with legal rights is because the idea of legal personhood does not belong to their particular world views. The indigenous symbol functioned to obscure the fact that the constitutional rights of nature are the creation of advocates themselves, and not read off from indigeneity (2015: 115).
The point here is that not only are rights problematic because of their constitutive (racist) exclusions, but the movement itself stands in particularly complicated relationship to actual Indigenous communities, as key proponents continue to rehearse ‘strategically essentialist’ and often highly romanticized simplifications of Indigenous worldviews. The paradoxical result is that Indigenous worldviews are often upheld as one of the most important ethical or philosophical sources of inspiration for the expansion of ‘rights’ to nature while at the same time Indigenous scholars have argued that the language is not only antithetical to Indigenous understandings of place but might even be used to legitimate their continued removal from ancestral lands. As Virginia Marshall has powerfully put it in the case of Australia: “The First Peoples of Australia have experienced waves of Western policies and laws to remove, alienate, and assimilate communities and individuals, and this Western legal construct [the rights of nature] is complicit in decoupling the oldest living and continuing Indigenous cultures in the world” (Marshall et al., 2019: 5). Marshall continues: “The ‘rights of nature’ philosophy and legal personhood will not offer appropriate redress or remedy to address historically entrenched flaws in the policy and laws of institutionalized colonial nation-states. The rights of nature [simply] replaces one western framework for yet another non-Indigenous framework… for us, it creates another colonial tool to remove First Nations’ inherent rights and interests – perpetuating an ongoing cycle of further disempowerment for First Nations” (Marshall 2021).
Taking seriously these critiques of the racist exclusions, simplifications, and mystifications that remain embedded within notions of both legal personhood and rights as they pertain to the rights of nature movement, in the following section I consider how CELDF’s pedagogical and legal strategies around these rights might complicate – albeit not resolve – these concerns in surprising ways.
Three strategies: From rights of nature to racial justice?
First strategy – framing the struggle: from the ‘Slave state’ to the ‘Corporate state’?
One of the earliest and most long-standing aspects of CELDF’s organizing work with communities over the past two decades has been their efforts to persuade communities that contemporary struggles to extend ‘rights’ to nature are direct extensions of previous human rights struggles, including most prominently the struggle to abolish chattel slavery in the United States in the 19th century. This is an argument that they regularly advance as part of their grassroots ‘Democracy Schools’ and ‘Community Rights Workshops’ which are held all over the country. I have attended a number of these workshops over the years, but for the sake of illustration, I focus here on a ‘Community Rights’ workshop held at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio on a blustery winter day in February 2018. Run by two middle-aged white women from CELDF, and sparsely attended by a few students, interested community members, and a local organizer opposed to a major gas pipeline, the workshop pivoted around a 400-page course reader. Juxtaposing news articles about recent rights of nature struggles across the country with historical documents about previous human rights struggles, the reader was explicitly organized to cultivate a sense of connection to earlier social justice movements, with a significant focus on movements against slavery and Jim Crow. As the two organizers took us through the history of the settlement of Ohio, the development of its state constitution, and recent efforts to pass municipal laws protecting the ‘rights’ of watersheds, they repeatedly drew attention to parallels between the period of slavery that officially ended in 1865 and the first decades of the 21st century. As one explained, summarizing the thrust of the day’s discussion and referring us to the last pages of the course reader: “Today, instead of people being treated as property and slave owners being empowered by law to trump their human and civil rights, we have corporate property being treated by the courts as ‘persons,’ with constitutional protections used to subordinate the rights of human beings” (OCRN, 410). They clarified: Whereas in the past slave-owners were legally permitted to abuse and destroy their ‘property’ (enslaved laborers), now corporations are legally treated as ‘persons’ and permitted to abuse and destroy everyone and everything who challenge or constrain that ‘personhood.’
Unlike other rights of nature activists elsewhere in the world in places like Ecuador, Bolivia, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, for whom these rights have very different associations and emerge out of very different state-civil society relations (see, for example, Kauffman and Martin, 2021), US activists associated with CELDF tend to see themselves as participating in the extension and amplification of previous rights movements in the United States. These movements include most prominently the Abolitionist movements of the late 1800s, the women’s movement of the early 1900s, and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s – all movements that sought to challenge the status of people previously conceived as either right-less property or legal non-persons. This emphasis on the progressive transformation of beings construed as ‘property’ into fully legal ‘persons’ has roots in the early work of the founding U.S.-based legal scholar of the rights of nature, Christopher Stone. As part of his 1972 argument for extending legal standing to parks like California’s Mineral King, he argued that the rights of nature were only the most recent extension of previous rights struggles. In Stone’s own words: “Women, slaves, and African Americans, were once rightless… It is not until the rightless thing receives its rights that we can see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’ – those who are holding rights at the time” (Stone, 1972; Pecharroman, 2019). These rights might be ‘frightening or laughable,’ he went on to note in the early 1970s, but so too were those of women and enslaved peoples in the previous century.
Bringing this argument into the contemporary period, CELDF organizers sought to demonstrate similarities between quite different struggles to transform formerly right-less beings into rights-holders under conditions of significant state oppression. However, they also went significantly further than Stone – and in a somewhat different direction – by tracing historical connections between what they call the ‘corporate state’ of the early 21st century (which refuses to recognize the rights of ecosystems) and the ‘slave state’ of the late 19th century (which refused to recognize the rights of enslaved peoples). In numerous publications, they have advanced arguments about the connections between the ‘system of law’ established by the slave-owning ‘founding fathers’ prior to the abolition of slavery and that which continues to insulate corporate interests from democratic control today. As, for example, they explain in a 2016 working paper problematically entitled, ‘Slaves in all but name,’ While the U.S. Constitution enabled the enslavement of millions, in a more general sense, it afforded commerce the highest constitutional protections. The creation of the “commerce clause” within the Constitution – which bans local and state governments from directly regulating large areas of industry – can be directly traced to some of the wealthiest “founding fathers” who sought to prevent local and state governments from interfering with commerce and industry. Those commercial protections, far from being destroyed by those who eventually brought down the slave state, morphed to protect newly rising industrial and commercial powers, now in the form of corporations.
Not only, then, in CELDF’s view, are contemporary rights of nature organizers extending previous rights struggles such as those of the 19th century abolitionists, but the ‘system of law’ that ‘enabled the enslavement of millions’ directly continues today in the form of the commerce clause which simply ‘morphed to protect… corporations.’ It is this system that they encourage communities to challenge. As they explain in a 2018 book entitled, Rebelling Against the Corporate State, further drawing out the historical analogy, “While slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists faced off against the ‘slave state’ of the 1800s – which had to be dismantled to free individual slaves – communities today must face off against a ‘corporate state’” (CELDF, 2018). To date, according to their own figures, more than 200 municipalities across the United States have taken up this challenge. Celebrating this success, CELDF notes in a 2016 blogpost: “While not putting their lives on the line as slaves were forced to do, thousands of people today in close to 200 communities across the country have begun to liberate themselves from the ‘corporate state.”
In the training materials and pamphlets used by CELDF at these workshops, these arguments about continuities between abolitionist struggles against the ‘slave state’ and contemporary struggles against the ‘corporate state’ recur with surprising frequency. And they are often used to further underscore the importance of challenging not just the state, but what they call the ‘reformist environmentalism’ of the Big Green groups. These are groups which, in CELDF’s view, have been instrumental in the perpetuation of a legal system set up to protect corporate ‘persons’ and their so-called ‘property.’ The solutions that these groups propose for addressing the environmental crisis are, from their perspective, as patently false and insufficiently structural as were those proposed by the American Colonization Society in the first two decades of the 19th century. The parallels with the ante-bellum period continue. As they go on to argue in Rebelling Against the Corporate State: Slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists faced their own wolf in sheep’s clothing – a group called the American Colonization Society… Buying land in Africa to relocate newly freed slaves, the organization touted itself as putting blacks ‘into a better situation,’ away from the deep-seated prejudice against African Americans that existed in the U.S. at the time… Rather than pretending that the Society had the same goals as the Abolitionist movement, leading white abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, called out the Society directly. Garrison accused it of embracing the second-class status of African Americans and perpetuating discrimination and prejudice. Eventually, under the onslaught of the free black community in the North and white abolitionists, the American Colonization Society was forced to dissolve. A similar drive is needed to clear the landscape of the well-intended environmental organizations, whose goals are not the same as those working to recognize the legal authority of communities to reject harmful corporate projects outright (2018: 100–101).
While these parallels with abolitionist organizing have undoubtedly played an important role in encouraging predominantly white rural communities to think of their struggles in ways that allow them to see themselves as continuous with the Abolitionist and subsequent Civil Rights movements, what I want to note here is that for many years these references to previous racial justice struggles were just that – references to the past or to abolition as a bounded project that came to a close with the formal end of slavery in 1865. That is, they did not translate into any racial solidarity work or coalesce into a more far-reaching analysis of the workings of racial capitalism. To a critical eye, these allusions might even seem a kind of historically selective hubris that fundamentally misconstrues the scale of the violence inflicted by white supremacy, equating the struggles of the disproportionately white rural communities with which CELDF most often works with the struggles of 19th century communities agitating for the end of slavery – communities that were routinely lynched, burned, and beaten for their efforts to overthrow the institution. Close readings of these documents suggest a partial appropriation of abolitionist histories – one that, for the sake of demonstrating continuities with contemporary organizing, arguably underplays violence and fails to recognize the deeply unfinished work of abolition in the contemporary period. While CELDF importantly focuses on the emergence of the ‘corporate state,’ it does not, in many of these documents, highlight other historical connections such as those between the ‘slave state’ and today’s epidemic of racialized state violence (rather than just today’s corporate insulation from democratic control). Nor does it attend carefully to the processes long-documented by the environmental justice movement by which the ‘corporate state’ continues to disproportionately pollute and poison Black communities as part of what Robert Bullard called many years ago, racial ‘sacrifice zones’ (Bullard, 1993).
However understandable this may have been for an organization focused primarily on rectifying environmental harms and extending rights to non-humans, this partial and selective engagement with racial injustice began to shift in the mid-2010s. This was because CELDF found itself increasingly engaged in legal efforts to challenge state pre-emption of local law-making at a time when racialized state violence was becoming more and more apparent to white people, making spectacularly visible the extent to which Black communities (rather than just ecosystems) are still treated as non-persons. It is toward CELDF’s legal battles against state pre-emption that I now turn.
Second strategy: Fighting state pre-emption in the court room
In recent years, CELDF’s experimentation with municipal law-making has brought these lawyers to a more explicit theorization of the ways that state agencies (both state governments and state regulatory bodies such as the Ohio Department of Natural Resources) are increasingly undermining efforts at both environmental and social protection, including stronger protections for Black and other racially minoritized communities in the United States. As one of the lead organizers in Ohio explained to me in 2018, the fight for the rights of nature (whether of Lake Erie in Toledo or ‘natural communities and ecosystems’ in Columbus) has increasingly revealed to organizers a state-corporate nexus that aims to strip communities of local decision-making capabilities which they had previously enjoyed – a process that has been ongoing for many years but that has seen a sharp escalation since the mid-2000s. In Ohio, one organizer explained, prior to 2004 municipalities were granted what is known as ‘concurrent jurisdiction’ with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR). This meant that oil and gas companies were required to comply with all local legislation related to the drilling and operation of oil and gas wells and that, importantly, local laws could require more but not less stringent health and safety standards than those required by the state government. However, as the natural gas boom exploded in the early decades of the 21st century, with hundreds of companies scrambling to secure contracts across the mid-western region, this form of jurisdiction was removed by Ohio House Bill 278 (HB 278). The bill, passed by a Republican-controlled and majority white state legislature, effectively threw out concurrent jurisdiction so that the state of Ohio now bore sole responsibility for the regulation of oil and gas exploration. Because of this changed legislative context, CELDF lawyers advancing the rights of nature across the state have found it nearly impossible to get their municipal charters upheld in court. As, for example, Judge Michael Astrab argued in his rejection of a charter amendment that granted rights to ecosystems in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Broadview Heights in 2014: “As codified in [HB 278], this amendment specifically granted the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Mineral Resources Management the ‘sole and exclusive authority’ to regulate the permitting, locating, and spacing of oil and gas wells within Ohio. Additionally, [HB 278] contains an express prohibition against local governments exercising powers in a way that ‘discriminates against, unfairly impedes, or obstructs oil and gas activities and operations’ (CV-14–828,074).
Through significant losses in court such as this one (there have been many others since), CELDF organizers quickly discovered that they were facing large-scale and well-funded efforts at state pre-emption that affected a growing number of local government initiatives. In simplest terms, state preemption is the legal doctrine by which state laws automatically over-ride local laws. As one organizer explained to me, state pre-emption is dramatically on the rise all across the country, and in the state of Ohio since 2004 when concurrent jurisdiction was revoked in relation to the oil and gas industries, the state government has gone on to pass a raft of legislation pre-empting local municipalities from banning automatic weapons in public parks (2006), insisting on residency requirements for city officials including police officers (2006), or passing minimum wage laws in excess of the state minimum (2016). In very direct ways, these acts of pre-emption have worked not just to undermine the health of ecosystems that is of such concern to rights of nature activists, but to contribute to the perpetuation of violence and discrimination against Black communities. So much is this the case that scholars have even begun to argue that ceiling preemption – that is, the form of state preemption in which the state steps in to curb the ability of progressive municipalities to enact stronger regulations than the state has mandated – is a form of structural racism that exacerbates a range of racial inequalities. This is because, as Courtnee Melton-Fant has recently argued, across the United States it is “majority white state legislatures [that] are often preempting policies that would disproportionately benefit Black people and other people of color,” including the redirection of police budgets to support low-income housing and other social services (Melton-Fant, 2022: 17, 19). An Ohio-based rights of nature organizer made a similar point to me by phone in March 2018. As she noted, scholarship on the criminal justice system suggests that requiring police officers to live in the communities they police significantly reduces the likelihood that they will use lethal force against residents. Thus, by passing state pre-emption laws that prevent municipalities from enacting residency requirements for city officials, including police officers, communities of color are much more likely to continue to face the kinds of violence about which the Movement for Black Lives has been sounding the alarm since the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013.
Part of the aim, then, for both CELDF and racial justice organizations is to enact heightened community control over a range of issues that from the perspective of more conservative and overwhelmingly white state governments considerably exceed their mandates. Just as CELDF has worked with local communities across the country to pass municipal legislation enshrining rights for nature so, too, municipalities in states across the country have been organizing (equally unsuccessfully in many cases) to pass laws requiring police officers and other public officials to meet certain residency requirements. The failures of both efforts in the face of growing pre-emption by state legislatures have meant that not only are environmental protections increasingly weak, but the likelihood that police will use excessive force against Black communities, and especially Black men, remains unacceptably high. As is also the case for the U.S. environmental justice organizers that Laura Pulido has recently written about, there is a strong and deepening sense among CELDF organizers that the state is definitively not an ally and that all reformist measures in the face of state pre-emption are simply not going to work. As Pulido explains: “Activists have… prioritized engaging with the state… They have believed that by working closely with regulators, through regulatory attention [and] judicial action, the conditions in their communities would improve…What is needed on the part of the EJ movement is a fundamental rethinking of its attitude toward the state. Instead of seeing the state as a helpmate or partner, it needs to see the state as an adversary and directly challenge it” (Pulido, 2016: 16). What this second strategy of municipal law-making suggests is that a similar process of radicalization may be taking place among predominantly white rights of nature organizers. Increasingly, these organizers are not stopping their political analyses by drawing parallels with the abolitionist movement of the 19th century (as described in the previous section). Instead, they are moving toward more robust conceptualizations of the structural obstacles at the level of the state that face a range of progressive movements – obstacles that draw together in perhaps unlikely ways movements for the rights of lakes and movements for racial justice.
Third strategy: Municipal law-making in the service of de-funding the police
While it is too soon to say what may become of this emerging understanding of how state preemption undermines both the rights of nature and contemporary racial justice struggles, in this third section I explore some of CELDF’s most recent work in which they have sought to more directly amplify abolitionist organizing inspired by the Movement for Black Lives. While this data must be treated as highly preliminary, it provides a snapshot of how rights of nature activists may be coming to re-imagine their roles in a national landscape powerfully marked by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. When the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd set cities alight across the country in the summer of 2020, CELDF, like many other environmental organizations, was quick to issue statements of solidarity. In these statements they took the opportunity to underscore their position that the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent attacks on protestors in mid-western American cities once again revealed the illegitimacy of a state that is more concerned with crimes against corporate property than crimes against either people or ecosystems. In a post on their website dated 2 June 2020 and entitled “Stand with George Floyd: Life > Property,” they explained of the destruction that was then taking place in cities across the country: “Critics who imply that property destruction is equivalent to the violence public servants inflict on people erase the truth that property ownership and protection are themselves acts of violence, existing through exploited labor and stolen lands.” Unlike the statements by mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, their statement condemned the response of the state as indicative of precisely the prioritization of property rights against which they have long pushed in their efforts to write municipal ordinances that explicitly challenge, circumscribe, and even nullify corporate rights within municipal limits.
However, CELDF also went further by again flagging their distance from, and differences with, mainstream environmental groups. Specifically, they sought to draw comparisons between those groups who, in response to the BLM protests, timidly suggested superficial efforts at ‘police reform’ and their counterparts in the mainstream environmental movement who equally timidly work to reform the environmental regulatory system. As they explained, regulatory ‘fixes’ for police violence such as training around so-called ‘implicit bias’ or body cameras for officers represent little more than ‘lipstick on a pig’ (that is, thinly pragmatic and insufficiently structural efforts that have long been tried and failed). These fixes, they argued, are just as problematic as efforts to improve the fundamentally broken environmental regulatory system. In their view, the problem in both cases is that there is an inherently immoral and intractable harm (systems set up to prioritize and protect property above people) that cannot simply be better regulated with a few modifications to process or principles. The blog continues: “The belief in regulating something which is structurally flawed or harmful is a lie, and it pervades society. The paradigm of regulation of harm has failed.” In arguing along these lines, CELDF activists sought to use the BLM protests of 2020 to accomplish two things – first, to underscore their solidarity with the movement in the form of an explicitly shared opposition to all reformist approaches to addressing police violence that do not involve a thorough rethinking of the history and contemporary structures of racialized policing in the United States; and second, to build on the momentum around BLM to bolster and further radicalize their own antagonistic approaches to environmental protection – approaches that are often seen by critics as highly irregular, often largely counter-productive because they so often fail in the court system, and even illegal.
While critics might want to be suspicious of just how deep these commitments to solidarity run, and while this focus has already begun to waver a bit over the last year or so, there is no doubt that CELDF is in the process of quite substantially transforming their approaches to re-thinking environmental law in ways that extend well beyond their traditional focus on the rights of nature. Despite internal disagreements, they are also clearly seeking to de-center their work as part of broader and more explicitly multi-racial coalitions. As they explain on their updated website that now explicitly references both the importance of ‘decolonizing’ the law and challenging white supremacy: There are a multitude of different ways to decolonize the law (including, but not limited to, recognizing the rights of ecosystems) and increase local self-determination… Black-led demands for multiracial local self-determination compliment the Movement for Black Lives’ demand for more community control. The validity of the root demands of our work—that a dramatic transformation of tyrannical legal doctrines is needed to empower people and planet over profit, and a re-localization of protective political power is necessary to establish justice—is proven by how they are resonating with a multitude of emancipatory movements. All are coming to similar conclusions. (CELDF, 2021)
While a statement like this may represent a strategically essentialist glossing over the differences between diverse approaches to ‘empowering people and planet over profit,’ CELDF is beginning to enact this foregrounding of racial justice struggles much more centrally in its day-to-day operations. For example, in April 2021 organizers from across the country ran a well-attended webinar entitled “Intersectionality: Why Racial Justice Is Essential to the Environmental Movement.” While all the organizers it featured were white, they explicitly and repeatedly problematized their whiteness, critiqued the racial exclusions of the American conservation movement, re-framed environmental problems as symptoms of the “racism of the colonial state,” and even self-reflexively recognized that historically “we haven’t made a space for BIPOC in this movement.” As one of the featured speakers succinctly explained: “White people created this system and we need to dismantle this system…I lead with being an abolitionist. Environmental problems are secondary.”
Perhaps even more interestingly, in 2020–2021 CELDF began drafting model ordinances that directly borrow from, and build on, the work of prison and police abolitionist organizers, including the Movement for Black Lives Policy Platform and #8toAbolition – ordinances like the ones that were formerly written to protect eco-systems (recall the 200+ communities challenging the ‘corporate state’), but that can now be adapted by communities seeking to end state-funded violence in their communities. Building on their draft ordinances for the rights of nature, CELDF organizers have begun to create template ordinances for municipalities seeking to restructure the police within their communities, preventing, in their words, “state-funded violence by restricting access to tactics, such as no-knock warrants,” and “prohibiting specific police activities such as patrols, their participation in social services, and outreach” (CELDF Model Ordinance, 2021). The aim, as they explain, is to not to usurp, replace, dilute, or take away from the abolitionist organizing that has been taking place for decades (Wilson Gilmore, 2017; 2008), but to support it using the tools they have developed as grassroots lawyers working to upend corporate prerogatives around ecosystems in local communities. As they explain: “Many generations of Black organizers and Indigenous peacekeepers have dedicated their lives to building this movement and sharing their insights” (CELDF, 2021). More fully acknowledging and beginning to collaborate with these organizers is changing how CELDF describes the law more generally. As they now explain succinctly on their updated website: “Our system of law and government was founded in white supremacy and colonization” (CELDF, 2021).
Unlike other environmental organizations, then, CELDF is not simply issuing statements of solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives. Instead, they are drawing on their experiences with intensifying state pre-emption in courtrooms across the country to move toward a more robust articulation of their affinities with communities facing a hostile and anti-democratic state-corporate nexus that sacrifices both ecosystems and racially minoritized communities. This is not to say that there is not still considerable work to be done by CELDF in this space. Indeed, in the years since, they have struggled to maintain this focus as they have undergone significant staffing changes. However, my argument has been that these efforts at articulating their resonances and interconnections with more traditionally anthropocentric concerns, including racial justice, have evolved over the last decade as CELDF has moved away from understanding rights for nature simply as liberal extensions of previous human rights struggles in the way that Christopher Stone first articulated them. In the years both leading up to and directly following the murder of George Floyd, they have begun to more frontally engage contemporary racial justice struggles by more clearly understanding (1) the ways that state pre-emption is limiting possibilities for progressive action across a range of social and environmental issues; (2) how deeply embedded white supremacy and settler colonial domination are in the structure of U.S. law; and (3) how to put the tools of municipal ordinance-writing first developed to advance the rights of nature to work in the service of local efforts toward police abolition.
Conclusion
Scholars of environmental justice have for decades analyzed how racism has structured both the distribution of environmental harms and access to justice for those harms (Martinez-Alier et al., 2016). In the last few years, they have also begun to engage much more specifically with the demands and organizing strategies of the Movement for Black Lives. For example, in his 2016 “Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Studies,” David Pellow asks a series of questions about what the environmental justice movement might learn from Black Lives Matter. He wonders: “How can Black Lives Matter’s emphasis on police violence against African American communities inform our understanding of the scourge of ecological burdens facing those same communities? Conversely, what can the violation of Black bodies and spaces by ecologically destructive agents produced by states and corporations tell us about the violation of those same bodies by police and law enforcement agents?” (Pellow, 2016: 222). In this article, I have asked a version of these same questions, but with a focus on the organizing strategies, media discourses, and legal tactics of a predominantly white organization for the rights of nature in the United States. While environmental justice organizations have long been at the forefront of asking such questions (and have often failed to be widely supported by majority-white environmental groups), in recent years in the face of highly visible police violence, strategic organizing on the part of the Movement for Black Lives, and a still-unfolding national racial reckoning with structural racism, organizations like CELDF have also begun to take up this charge. This is significant for the three primary reasons noted in the introduction – the growing recognition of white supremacy within the environmental movement (which, as Dorceta Taylor reminds us, remains overwhelmingly white across much of the Global North); the role of racism in emboldening nationalist regimes with environmentally regressive policies that are often supported by rural white communities; and the growth of far-right groups that are attracted to the environmental movement as one of the last ‘bastions of whiteness’ – groups that increasingly seek to appropriate eco-centric discourses such as the rights of nature (Taylor 2018, 2019). Better understanding how historically white grassroots organizers such as those affiliated with CELDF are responding to this particularly lethal confluence of racism and environmental violence – a confluence characteristic of what Miyake has recently called the “racial environmental state” – is work that, it seems to me, might not only serve as an antidote to the most destructive of these trends, but might even prove useful to the kind of scaling-up and diversifying of the broader environmental movement that is increasingly being called for at the international level (Miyake, 2021; Moore, 2015). As outgoing UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, E. Tendayi Achiume, recently put it in an October 2022 report: “Both within and outside the United Nations, member states are championing initiatives to develop responses to the global ecological crisis. In this context, a racial justice approach to this crisis is both urgent and necessary… The global ecological crisis is simultaneously a racial justice crisis” (Achiume, 2022).
Building on work in critical geography and anthropology (Pulido, 2016; Miyake, 2021; Kojola and Pellow, 2020; Yusoff, 2019), what I have offered in this article, is an argument for attending more closely to the actual organizing work being done on the ground by radical white environmental groups with historically eco-centric agendas. The case study of CELDF illuminates how the transnational movement for the rights of nature – a movement that has been (rightly, in my view) critiqued for relying uncritically on rights discourses that carry within them legacies of racial exclusivism and cultural essentialism – is, in practice, and in one national context, moving toward interventions that increasingly engage and even center racial justice, albeit not always sufficiently carefully and not always in the most sustained ways. Specifically, I have shown how CELDF lawyers and activists are not simply repeating liberal mantras about the progressive expansion of rights discourses or rehearsing long-standing constructions of the movement as somehow a natural culmination or outgrowth of previous rights struggles. Instead, as a direct result of both the broader national climate of anti-Black racism in the U.S. and their own experimentation with municipal law-writing and law-breaking, they are coming to participate much more directly in the abolitionist struggles of the contemporary moment. Like their counterparts in the predominantly Black and Brown environmental justice movement, they increasingly understand the state in fundamentally antagonistic terms (not as an ally in reform efforts) and they explicitly name the white supremacist foundations of that state – a settler-colonial institution founded on extraction and accumulation by dispossession that damages racially minoritized people as brutally as it damages ecosystems.
While most of the scholarly literature on the rights of nature movement still locates the roots of the contemporary ecological crisis in legal and/or philosophical anthropocentrism (Boyd, 2017), in practice what these activists seem to be learning is that the most significant obstacles to the rights of nature are state structures that make impossible the institutionalization of both ecological and racial justice. Challenging the violence of this state and of racial capitalism more broadly is work that will likely continue to bring these activists into more sustained collaboration with contemporary abolitionists and others who understand that ecological flourishing will only be possible by seriously resisting and reconfiguring state authority across a range of socio-ecological domains. At a time when many environmental organizations across the Global North continue to be accused of failing to sufficiently appreciate, support, and engage traditional social justice struggles, including struggles for racial justice (Bell and Bevan, 2021; Purdy, 2015; Hultgren and Stevis, 2019; Hultgren, 2018), the case of CELDF illuminates processes of radicalization that may prove increasingly necessary to acknowledging and redressing this neglect. If there is a way forward in this moment of what Ghassan Hage calls, ‘colonial-ecological crisis’ (Hage, 2016), it will be to listen to the voices of grassroots organizers working toward the expansion of coalitions that more powerfully center both Indigenous sovereignty and Black freedom in their struggles to meet pressing environmental challenges.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.