Source: http://elawreview.org/environmental-law-review-syndicate/an-ecology-of-liberation-the-shifting-landscape-of-environmental-law-in-an-era-of-changing-environmental-values/
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An Ecology of Liberation: The Shifting Landscape of Environmental Law in an Era of Changing Environmental Values - Environmental Law
Home » Environmental Law Review Syndicate » 2016 » An Ecology of Liberation: The Shifting Landscape of Environmental Law in an Era of Changing Environmental Values
By Michael Zielinski in Environmental Law Review Syndicate, 2016, Environmental Law Review Syndicate
Topics: Ecojustice, Environmental Ethics, Environmental Justice, Liberation Theology, Value Theory
Michael Zielinski is a J.D. Candidate at William & Mary Law School for the Class of 2017.
Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation 196-203 (Sister Caridad Inda & John Eagleson, eds. and trans., 1973) [hereinafter A Theology of Liberation](originally published in Spanish as Teología de la liberación, Perspectivas 1971).↵
Id. at 117 (“[P]overty expresses solidarity with the oppressed and a protest against oppression.”).↵
Matthew 25:31-45.↵
Pope Francis I, Laudato Si’ ¶ 2 (2015); see also Cristina Maza, One Year Later, How a Pope’s Message on Climate Change Has Resonated, Christian Science Monitor (June 24, 2016), http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0624/One-year-later-how-a-Pope-s-message-on-climate-has-resonated (“In the year since Pope Francis released his encyclical, Laudato Si’, imploring his followers and fellow believers to care for the earth and its creatures, observers say more and more Roman Catholics are beginning to view climate change as a moral issue in which caring for the earth and caring for the poor intersect.”).↵
A Theology of Liberation, supra note 1, at 22.↵
Pope Francis I, supra note 5, at § 15 ((quoting Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis ¶ 15 (1979)); see also Pope Francis I, Care for Creation, Thepopevideo.org (Feb. 5, 2016), http://thepopevideo.org/en/video/ care-creation.html (“The relationship between poverty and the fragility of the planet requires another way of managing the economy and measuring progress.”).↵
See Leonardo Boff & Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology 9 n.1 (Paul Burns trans., 24th prtg. 2011) (identifying the second Latin American bishops’ conference held at Medellín, Columbia in 1968, which met to discuss strategies for implementing the pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council, as the “official launching” of the theme of liberation in Latin America).↵
See generally The Hope of Liberation in World Religions (Miguel A. De La Torre ed., 2008) (providing an analysis of the liberationist elements within a number of religious traditions).↵
This is not always true, however. For example, consider the women’s liberation and animal liberation movements.↵
See Part II.B., infra.↵
See, e.g., Sarah Krakoff, Planetarian Identity Formation and the Relocalization of Environmental Law, 64 Fla. L. Rev. 87, 92-93 (2012) (identifying the rapid growth of localism—“placing value on working and buying locally”—as a response to growing awareness about the dangers of climate change).↵
See, e.g., Malavika Vyawahare, Faith Leaders Call for Climate Change Action, ClimateWire, Nov. 12, 2015, http://www.eenews.net/climatewire/stories/1060027860/search?keyword=pope+ francis (reporting on a symposium where more than fifty delegates representing a range of faiths expressed their hopes that members of all religions would rally around fighting both climate change and poverty).↵
See Press Release, White House, U.S. Leadership and the Historic Paris Agreement to Combat Climate Change (Dec. 12, 2015), https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/12/us-leadership-and-historic-paris-agreement-combat-climate-change (announcing the U.S.’s commitment to achieving the goals for combating climate change set forth in the Paris Agreement reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).↵
See Richard Herrmann, Pew Oceans Commission, America’s Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change 5, http://www.pewoceans.org/oceans/ press_release.asp. (2003) (“We have reached a crossroads where the cumulative effect of what we take from, and put into, the ocean substantially reduces the ability of marine ecosystems to produce the economic and ecological goods and services that we desire and need. What we once considered inexhaustible and resilient is, in fact, finite and fragile.”).↵
See Jedidiah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene 1-2 (2015) [hereinafter After Nature] (acknowledging the general consensus in the scientific community that for some time the earth been in a new geological epoch, one in which “humans are a force, maybe the force, shaping the planet.”).↵
Krakoff, supra note 12, at 98 (“The global atmosphere is a common-pool resource, and since industrialization, agents have acted in their rational self-interest by emitting greenhouse gases in order to benefit from inexpensive energy. Even now that we know about the market’s failure to internalize the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, rational actors will still opt for cheap energy over reductions in greenhouse gas emissions because of the possibility that a defector could undermine the regime of curbing emissions.”).↵
See After Nature, supra note 16, at 2(“The Anthropocene finds its most radical expression in our acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate.”). ↵
See id. at 46 (arguing that “natural catastrophe amplifies existing inequality” because the wealthy are better able to absorb and acclimate to the harmful consequences of man-made ecological damage).↵
See Jedidiah Purdy, Our Place in the World: A New Relationship for Environmental Ethics and Law, 62 Duke L.J. 857, 871-77 (2013) [hereinafter Our Place in the World] (explaining how philosophical accounts of environmental ethics in the 1970’s struggled to produce an agreed-upon basis for valuing nature that could be translated into law, thereby leading policymakers to turn to the economic theories that have defined environmental law for last four decades).↵
See Linda Malone, Exercising Environmental Human Rights and Remedies in the United Nations System, 27 Wm.& Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev. 365, 365 (2002) (“Whenever environmental degradation results in a human harm that violates accepted human rights norms, an international, regional or domestic human rights committee, commission, and/or court may provide a remedy that can contribute effectively to rectifying the underlying environmental degradation as well as the human rights violation.”). ↵
See Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 883 (arguing that the divide that has grown between environmental ethics and environmental law over the last forty years demands that the law reshape itself to reflect our creative ethical capacity).↵
See After Nature, supra note 16, at 262 (“[E]verything is connected to everything else, often in subtle and hidden ways, and any attempt to master the whole from a single standpoint is hubris and likely to turn out badly.”).↵
http://www.wmelpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/An-Ecology-of-Liberation-ELRS-submission.pdf.↵
For an insightful and detailed analysis of the evolution of American views on the value of the environment over the country’s history, see generally Jedidiah Purdy, American Natures: The Shape of Conflict in Environmental Law, 36 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 169 (2012).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 871. ↵
Daniel A. Farber, The Story of Boomer: Pollution and the Common Law, 32 Ecology L.Q. 113, 132 (2005).↵
National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Pub. L. No. 91-190, 83 Stat. 852 (1970)codified as amended at 42 U.S.C. §§ 4321–4347).↵
Clean Air Act, Pub. L. No. 91-604, 84 Stat. 1676 (1970) (codified as amended at 42.S.C. §§ 7401–7671).↵
Clean Water Act, Pub. L. No. 92-500, 86 Stat. 816 (1972) (codified as amended at 33.S.C. §§ 1251–1387).↵
Endangered Species Act of 1973, Pub. L. No. 93-205, 87 Stat. 844 (1973) (codified as amended at 16 U.S.C. §§ 1531-1534).↵
See Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology 31-32 (2008) (arguing that unlike biomedical ethics or business ethics, environmental ethics it has no “discernible social practices” upon which to base its inquiries).↵
See id. at 41.↵
Id. at 42. Jenkins identifies two other secular strategies besides nature’s standing: the strategy of moral agency, id. at 46-51, and the strategy of ecological subjectivity, id. at 51-57. I have chosen to concentrate on the strategy of nature’s standing because its efforts to correlate “normative obligations with the moral status of the nonhuman world” typically set it in direct opposition to the “blinkered economic rationalism of many public policy justifications.” Id. at 42. ↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 871.↵
John O’Neill, The Varieties of Intrinsic Virtue, 73 Monist 119, 119 (1992); see also Gary Varner, Biocentric Individualism, in Environmental Ethics 90, 92 (David Schmidtz & Elizabeth Willot eds., 2d ed. 2012) (“Intrinsic value is the value something has independently of its relationships to other things. If a thing has intrinsic value, then its existence (flourishing, etc.) makes the world a better place, independently of its value to anything else or any other entity’s awareness of it.”).↵
Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements, 16 Inquiry 95 (1973), reprinted in Environmental Ethics, supra note 37, at 129, 129 (contrasting “the Shallow Ecology movement,” which Naess describes as the “[f]ight against pollution and resource depletion” and having as its central objective “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries,” with “the Deep Ecology movement,” which he describes as “rejection of the man-in-environment image in favor of the relational, total-field image.”).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 871; see also Jenkins, supra note 33, at 42-43 (comparing J. Baird Callicott’s view of nature’s intrinsic value, which could generally be described as “biocentric,” with that of Holmes Rolston, which could generally be described as “ecocentric.”).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 872; see also, Jenkins, supra note 33, at 43 (identifying Eric Katz, Tom Regan, and Peter Singer as environmental ethicists who advocate for nature’s moral standing while rejecting intrinsic value theories).↵
O’Neill, supra note 37, at 119.↵
See Jenkins, supra note 33, at 19 (identifying these three theological strategies as “ecojustice,” “stewardship,” and “spiritual ecologies”).↵
See id. at 19-20 (explaining that the correspondence of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy with ecojustice, stewardship, and ecological spirituality, respectively, are only tendencies and not hard rules).↵
Id. at 64. ↵
See Michael Moody, Caring for Creation: Environmental Advocacy by Mainline Protestant Organizations, in The Quiet Hand of God 237, 239 (Robert Wuthnow & John Evans eds., 2002) (reporting that the term “ecojustice” was either coined or “made its public debut” in a 1972 strategic planning group of the American Baptist Churches). ↵
Compare Boff & Boff, supra note 8, at 14-15 (describing “pastoral theology” as a “middle level” of liberation theology that works as a “progressively integrating factor among pastors, theologians, and lay persons, all linked together around the same axis: their liberative mission.”), with Jenkins, supra note 33, at 62 (“In order to make environmental issues part of its churches’ enduring pastoral concerns, [ecojustice] redeployed Christian notions of justice to make appropriate response to nature fit with the rationale for existing humanitarian mission commitments.”).↵
Moody, supra note 47, at 240.↵
Jenkins, supra note 33, at 63.↵
Learn About Environmental Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/learn-about-environmental-justice (last updated Mar. 29, 2016). Alternatively, Julia B. Latham Worsham characterizes environmental justice as founded upon “the concept that minorities bear a disproportionate percentage of environmental burdens.” Julia B. Latham Worsham, Disparate Impact Lawsuits under Title VI, Section 602: Can a Legal Tool Build Environmental Justice?, 27 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 631, 633.↵
See Worsham, supra note 51, at 633-34 (crediting either a 1979 Texas environmental rights suit or a 1982 citizens’ protest “modeled after the civil rights protests of the 1960s” in Warren County, North Carolina against a polychlorinated biphenyl landfill as the root of the modern environmental justice movement). Worsham, though writing from a legal perspective, appears vulnerable to a criticism Jenkins levels against “[s]ociological observers of [environmental justice],” namely that they “tend to skip [environmental justice’s] associations with religion.” Willis Jenkins, The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity 206 (2013). Case in point, Jenkins notes that when the North Carolina citizens began their protest, “they marched out from a church,” see id., a fact Worsham omits.↵
See Moody, supra note 47, at 239 (“[Ecojustice] predates—by more than a decade—the widespread recognition within the secular environmental movement of the importance of highlighting justice connections.”).↵
See Videotape: What is “Environmental Justice”?, And Justice For All: Current Developments in Environmental Justice (Wm. & Mary Envtl. L. & Pol’y Rev. 2016), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/elprsymposium/2016/ environmentaljustice/2/. ↵
Exec. Order No. 12,898, 3 C.F.R. 859 (1995), reprinted in 42 U.S.C. § 4321 (1994).↵
Richard Bohannon & Kevin O’Brien, Saving the World (and the People in It, Too): Religion in Eco-Justice and Environmental Justice, in Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology (2011) (ebook), http://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=fdb6238f-f577-44f4-b171-b78afeec536e@sessionmgr4003&vid=1#AN=914925&db=nlebk [http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=914925&site=ehost-live].↵
Jenkins, supra note 33, at 64.↵
See Bohannon & O’Brien, supra note 56 (relying on the “Principles of Environmental Justice” developed by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, “which have been used ever since to summarize the moral impulse behind the movement,” to argue that environmental justice does not “explicitly advocate on behalf of the nonhuman world for its own sake—the ‘health’ of the nonhuman world is implicitly for the benefit of ‘present and future generations’ of humans”).↵
See id. (“Those of us . . . who do not come from oppressed communities must be cautious about claiming that we can fully understand or summarize the interests and ideas of environmental justice activists, and we must allow these activists to speak for themselves.”).↵
Jenkins, supra note 33,at 55 (“By insisting on fair distribution of environmental risks and benefits, environmental justice directs attention to inescapable ecological components of a decent human life.”).↵
See Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 873 (“Conceptually, the issue of intrinsic versus [instrumental] value rapidly produces a dilemma, an irresolvable standoff between anthropocentric and biocentric perspectives.”).↵
See id. (“The mind is the theater, so to speak, in which we experience value; but that does not make the mind value’s source, any more than it creates the other people with whom we have relationships.”). Purdy identifies a potential resolution to this problem in the concept of uncanniness, which will be explored in Part IV.↵
See id. at 875 (“Here the choice between the alternatives does have relevance to action, but each option is deeply unsatisfactory.”).↵
See supra page 8. ↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 876.↵
Varner, supra note 37, at 91.↵
See Elliott Sober, Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism, in Environmental Ethics, supra note 37, at 133 (making thissamepoint using different species of whales as an example).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20 at 876.↵
Id. at 875.↵
See Bohannon & O’Brien, supra note 56.↵
See Sober, supra note 76, at 133 (explaining the dilemma of a holistic environmental ethic).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 875.↵
Sober, supra note 76, at 137; see also After Nature, supra note 16, at 240 (making a similar point by asserting that human exploitation of domesticated animals should be no more “immune to ethical scrutiny” because humans “co-evolved” with those species than “slavery and gender segregation should be immune because they are widespread in human history.”). ↵
See Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 877.↵
See Jenkins, supra note 33, at 49 (quoting Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim & Claire Waterton, Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance 1 (2003)) (“[P]ractical rationality . . . . ‘is being driven not just by intellectual curiosity but also by an increasing sense that existing ways of thinking about nature are inadequate to practical needs,’ that in order to describe the dynamic relations among environment and society, one is ‘not well served by the noun-dominated languages used for describing both.’”).↵
Our Place in the World, supra note 20, at 863 (identifying the crucibles as “agricultural and food systems, the ethical status of animals, and climate change”).↵
After Nature, supra note 16, at 241.↵
Gustavo Gutiérrez, Toward A New Method: Theology and Liberation,in Gustavo Gutiérrez: Essential Writings 23, 30 (James B. Nickoloff ed., 1996).↵
Matthew 22:21.↵