Racializing Nature and Naturalizing Race

The way people treat each other and the way they treat their environment are inextricably intertwined. Thus, it is unsurprising that five centuries of colonialism, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and racial discrimination have produced climate change, mass extinction, desertification, deforestation, and polluted air, water, and lands. The West has used international law to institutionalize unaccountability for its racism and environmental harms. This article argues that international law’s inability to stem accelerating ecological decline is attributable to and inseparable from the discipline’s racism, and vice versa. This article explores five legal techniques—comparison, objectification, exploitation, taming, and extermination—that produce racist and environmentally harmful outcomes while cloaked in the legitimacy of the law. The racializing of nature and the naturalizing of race through international law depend on the erasure of subaltern worldviews. But another international law is possible where diverse sustainable legal traditions heretofore silenced make international law on their own terms.

Customary international law · Environmental law · International law · Legitimacy · Principle of legality · Race (biology) · Racism · Subaltern · Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration · Environmental law and policy · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses