Green Colonialism and Environmental Justice: Conflicting Imaginaries Shaping the Rights of Nature
(2022) Vers une nouvelle théorie politique environnementale ? — Location: Sciences Po Paris (13.December.2022)
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- Authors
Petel, Matthias 
- Abstract
- Drawing from various environmental ethics strands, proponents of the “rights of nature” consider that the failure of environmental law lies in its reproduction of the anthropocentric bias of Western ethics. In their view, nature must become a legal person with its own set of rights to combat its privatization and commodification. In this contribution, I argue that the rights of nature framework is compatible with various ideological imaginaries and could therefore be the subject of extremely diverse institutional implementations with contrasted outcomes in terms of power distribution. The central question is to determine which social groups may legitimately speak for nature and enforce its rights. In the first part, borrowing from Martinez-Alier, I discuss two archetypal imaginaries which might shape the implementation of the rights of nature. On the one hand, there is the wilderness myth and its colonial legacy, where the rights of nature serve as a legal justification for the preservation of natural areas in Global South driven by conservation experts. On the other hand, the environmental justice framework seeks to redress power imbalances in environmental decision-making processes. In this case, the rights of nature would reinforce local communities whose livelihoods depend on healthy ecosystems against neocolonial plunder. In the second part, I study instances where the rights of nature were recognized. It appears that indigenous communities are often elected to act as nature’s representatives. Far from fostering green colonialism, the rights of nature perform the role of a cultural bridge: indigenous peoples strategically use Western legal categories (“rights”, “nature”) to operate within the settler legal frameworks and benefit from greater protection. However, several blind spots persist in those initiatives, among which the revival of the “ecological noble savage” narrative and the essentialization of indigenous communities which are treated as monolithic entities obscuring internal power differentials.
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Petel, M. (2022). Green Colonialism and Environmental Justice: Conflicting Imaginaries Shaping the Rights of Nature. Vers une nouvelle théorie politique environnementale ?, Sciences Po Paris.