Human impacts have contributed to the loss of eighty-three percent of wild mammal biomass, and as many as one million plant and animal species face potential extinction. Additionally, climate change is altering the patterns of water availability such that over half of the world’s population will live in water-stressed areas by 2025. The western United States is already feeling the impact: the United States Bureau of Reclamation declared the first-ever official water shortage in the Colorado River Basin, triggering mandatory water cuts in the western states.
These alarming trends require immediate action. However, the predominant Western environmental legal framework is not up to the challenge. Because the Western worldview focuses on nature as a commodity for human consumption, Western environmental laws focus on how much the environment can be damaged instead of how much protection is owed to the environment. Additionally, economic dependence on extractive industries weakens governmental will to strictly enforce existing environmental protection laws. To strengthen environmental protections in the United States, or even just to promote enforcement of existing regulations, environmentalists need large corporations to use their political influence to affect governmental change. However, big companies, while vocally touting themselves as “green,” are reluctant to expend their political capital on environmental protections because “environmental issues aren’t a priority for many CEOs.” Thus, changing corporate cultures to make environmental issues a priority is critical to strengthening environmental protections in the United States.
Local units of government, in the United States as well as internationally, are adopting rights of nature laws at increasing rates; these laws grant legal rights to nature and codify Indigenous legal traditions of stewardship in order to strengthen legal protections for natural entities. While the growing rights of nature movement promises new avenues for environmental protection, conflicts with economic interests and traditional property rights can hinder enforcement of the rights of nature, indicating that community and corporate values are not completely aligned with the view of nature as a rights-bearing entity. This Note considers the potential for restorative justice—another legal tool rooted in Indigenous legal traditions—to push for a change in community and corporate values and advance the adoption and implementation of rights of nature laws.
The first section of this Note provides an introduction to the rights of nature. The second section examines the Western ideology of nature and its influence on U.S. environmental protection laws along with an overview of the rights of nature movement in the United States and the accompanying corporate resistance to the movement. After a comparison of the Western ideology and laws with other ideologies developed by Indigenous societies, the third section will interrogate attempts to protect environmental entities through rights of nature laws enacted in Ecuador, New Zealand, India, and Uganda. The fourth section will detail the use of restorative justice methods in environmental contexts by examining their implementation in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. Last, I will argue that environmental restorative justice practices can promote a shift in corporate and community values to increase implementation and enforcement of rights of nature laws.