Environmental Justice in the New Global Economy: Three Case Studies

This special issue evolved from a panel held at the November 2010 American Society for Legal History (ASLH) conference. The panel, entitled “The Ongoing ‘Resource Wars': Legal, Environmental, and Cultural Implications of Indigenous Resource Extraction,” came together so well that its participants felt compelled to sustain its conversation in printed form, in part because environmental and indigenous issues were underrepresented at the ASLH conference. Indeed, this panel was the only one to examine either environmental or indigenous legal contexts. In an age of increasing strain on the natural resources upon which the global economy depends and which sustain diverse indigenous communities around the globe, this topic demands attention, largely because the resource imperialism that scholars have examined in previous eras continues to divide and debilitate indigenous communities seeking to either participate in this global economy on their terms or to prevent extractive industries from damaging sensitive ecosystems which provide both economic and cultural sustenance.

For indigenous communities in the 21^st century, then, there is more continuity than change in how they are treated as political units and as cultural groups. As Jace Weaver argued in Defending Mother Earth: Native American Perspectives on Environmental Justice, indigenous peoples “view the environmental depredations being visited upon them as merely one more manifestation of the colonialism that has attacked their lives for over five hundred years. Ecojustice, therefore, cannot be discussed apart from that racism and colonialism.”1 While the weight of this history of environmental injustice is crushing, it remains important to reflect on the multiple ways that indigenous peoples have negotiated and continue to negotiate new forms of colonialism, including a variant that may be branded eco-colonialism.

This special issue features the work of emerging and established scholars probing the many dimensions of resource conflict in three locations: Namibia, South Africa; Ecuador, South America; and the Northern Plains of the United States. Designed to both highlight the particular details of each case and make connections across their cultural and geographical boundaries, these essays offer readers of Environmental Justice insights into the ways in which indigenous groups have contended with the extraordinary pressures exerted by state-sponsored mining operations and multinational corporations intent on extracting increasingly remote and valuable commodities such as coal, gold, diamonds, water, and oil. These battles over land and resources have strengthened indigenous groups' political sovereignty and cultural identity. Devon Pena has written that “concerted resistance to displacement and environmental degradation is one of these examples of the profound collection and rearticulation of a sense of place by local cultures that see themselves to be unjustly endangered by globalization and its discontents.”2 Yet these essays remind us that it is dangerous to essentialize indigenous peoples as either incapable of or uninterested in seeking the benefits of natural resource production or in engaging capitalism more broadly.3 These essays also complicate the narrative of indigenous peoples living in spaces that serve either environmental or economic purposes; in fact, as the first two essays show us, indigenous people's ecosystems have been commodified for environmental protection and eco-tourism at the expense of their political sovereignty.

In the first essay Sidney Harring takes us to southern Africa to consider the social and environmental impact of the global diamond trade. Harring, a professor of law at the CUNY Law School from 1983 until 2011 and currently Law Foundation of Saskatchewan Chair in Law and Public Policy at the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan, has been researching Namibian land rights for over a decade. He presented earlier findings at the 2004 centennial commemorative conference “Decontaminating the Namibian Past” at the University of Namibia; and in 2007 he co-authored the report “Our Land They Took: San Land Rights under Threat in Namibia,” which was published by the Legal Assistance Centre of Namibia. His article in this issue, entitled “Diamond Exploration and the San in Namibia: Toward a Legal History,” reflects new research conducted in the spring of 2011 that took Harring back to Namibia, the sixth largest producer of diamonds in the world, to assess the ongoing crisis among the San peoples (known also as the Kalahari Bushmen) who occupy, tenuously, land in Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa.

Harring examines the neo-colonialism born from joint state-corporate land use decisions, the suppression of indigenous rights, community removals, and the failure of international campaigns to ban “blood diamonds.” Unlike the Crow and Northern Cheyenne in North America, the subject of Jaime Allison's essay, the San peoples have not recovered politically or economically from the “genocide” and “ecocide” that resulted in part from lucrative gold mining projects by companies such as DeBeers, which began operations in Namibia in the 1920s. In addition to ongoing environmental pressures from joint Namibian-DeBeers diamond mining projects that commandeer valuable water resources, the San also contend with degradation of their ancestral homelands by neighboring African ethnic groups whose cattle destroy desert grasslands and by gold mining executives who have privatized Kalahari lands for ecopreserve ventures.

Judith Kimerling, Professor of Environmental Law and Policy in the Political Science Department and Environmental Studies Program at CUNY Queens College, finds similar dynamics at work in her examination of the Huaorani people's struggles in the Ecuadoran rainforest, in an essay entitled “Huaorani Land Rights in Ecuador: Oil, Contact, and Conservation.” Like Harring, Kimerling also conducted recent research in 2011, working with the Huaorani to help them understand the legal and ecological impact of expanding national and international interest in ecopreserves on Huaorani communities already reeling from the environmental legacy of oil extraction projects by Texaco (now Chevron) that have polluted their lands since the late 1960s. Kimerling traces the state-sponsored economic colonialism practiced by Texaco, which exploited official designations of Huaorani homelands as “tierras baldias,” or uncultivated waste lands, to force the removal of Huaorani families from their homes to Christian settlements. Kimerling also documents the ways in which Texaco controlled policy-making and scientific discourse to limit state regulation and minimize its responsibility for environmental degradation that resulted from its industrial infrastructure of wells, pipelines, and other oil-drilling equipment.

Echoing Harring, Kimerling stresses the difficulties indigenous groups have in enforcing international law designed to protect indigenous rights, to put what the Huaorani called “pretty words” in law into everyday practice. And as Harring's article did, Kimerling's reminds us that indigenous peoples can lose control of their homelands not only from environmental problems associated with resource extraction but also from perceived environmental solutions such as conservation and sustainable development, which includes eco-tourism. In addition to battling multinational oil companies, the Huaorani have had to contend with Ecuadoran bureaucracies, foreign non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies that seek to colonize their homeland for global conservation campaigns. While well-intentioned, these campaigns nonetheless ignore the political sovereignty and the economic needs of the Huaorani, who are seeking to continue developing their own grassroots eco-tourism operations on their terms.

American Indian nations have contributed tremendous resources to the material growth of the United States since its founding, often at gunpoint or via fraudulent treaties, and like the San and the Huaorani have paid a stiff price for gold, uranium, coal, or oil booms that weakened their political power and left a toxic legacy of environmental health problems that have affected multiple generations. American Indians have also fought hard to reclaim control over development of their resources so that they may determine the economic, environmental, social, and political implications of such development, as Jaime Allison shows us in his essay, entitled “From Survival to Sovereignty: 19070s Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination in Montana's Powder River Basin.” Allison, a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Virginia whose law degree and work experience in environmental law informs his essay, captures the tensions within Native American communities in desperate need of employing their land and resource base to provide for tribal members in ways that sustain both the land and their cultural values.

After World War II, Indian nations tied their sovereignty to retention and development of their land and resources, their political identities shaped by the international Cold War, decolonization by other victims of imperial violence, and American Indian nationalism stoked by corrupt management of tribal resources by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). As Allison points out, federal and corporate efforts to increase coal mining in the Great Plains, home to the Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes of Montana, led to unfair leasing practices that limited tribal decision-making. Moreover, pressing national energy needs led energy executives and government officials to conceive of the region as a “national sacrifice area,” justifying the environmental degradation that followed. Allison documents how Northern Cheyenne and Crow campaigns to gain more control over their own resources engendered a national campaign to rewrite existing legal relationships between tribal and federal governments. Allison situates his story at the intersections of federal Indian law, global economic production, and emerging environmental movements, highlighting the issue of democratic governance and its consequences for securing environmental regulations that mitigated the health and environmental hazards that affected both Indian workers and tribal members subjected to polluted water, air, and land and provided tribal governments authority to manage their own resources. For the Northern Cheyenne and the Crow, as well as the other nations that joined the Pan-Indian alliance for environmental and economic sovereignty, these campaigns meant individual and tribal survival.

Finally, Brian C. Hosmer draws on his extensive experience writing on Indigenous peoples' experiences with modern environmental and economic issues to establish the significance of and connections between these three essays. It is because his concluding section is so comprehensive and compelling that I keep my introductory comments brief. Hosmer, the H.G. Barnard Associate Professor of Western American History at the University of Tulsa, has written a monograph and co-edited a volume on American Indians' struggles to gain sovereignty over resources and land, to maintain cultural values in their stewardship of those resources and land, and to resolve the tensions that erupt between the imperatives of economic development and environmental protection. His engagement with these issues on a local, national, and global level makes him especially qualified to offer substantive comments on these essays.