People Plants And Justice

In an era of market triumphalism, this book probes the social and environmental consequences of market-linked nature conservation schemes. Rather than supporting a new anti-market orthodoxy, Zerner and colleagues assert that there is no universal entity, "the market." Original case studies from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific focus on topics as diverse as ecotourism, bioprospecting, oil extraction, cyanide fishing, timber extraction, and property rights.

"Amul Thapar sets the record straight with this can't-put-down series of stories that reveal the courage, decency, and humanity of the man behind what many are calling the Thomas Court." —Megyn Kelly, journalist "Amul Thapar has done what even gifted law professors and professional 'Court watchers' often fail to do: Thapar has focused on the men and women whose lives are before the nine and on how one justice, Clarence Thomas, has carefully, consistently, and compassionately applied his understanding of the Constitution to those lives." — Hugh Hewitt, host of The Hugh Hewitt Show and professor of law For thirty years, Clarence Thomas has been denounced as the “cruelest justice,” a betrayer of his race, an ideologue, and the enemy of the little guy. In this compelling study of the man and the jurist, Amul Thapar demolishes that caricature. Every day, Americans go to court. Invoking the Constitution, they fight for their homes, for a better education for their children, and to save their cities from violence. Recounting the stories of a handful of these ordinary Americans whose struggles for justice reached the Supreme Court, Thapar shines new light on the heart and mind of Clarence Thomas. A woman in debilitating pain whose only effective medication has been taken away by the government, the motherless children of a slain police officer, victims of sexual assault— read their eye-opening stories, stripped of legalese, and decide for yourself whether Thomas’s originalist jurisprudence delivers equal justice under law. “Finding the right answer,” Justice Thomas has observed, “is often the least difficult problem.” What is needed is “the courage to assert that answer and stand firm in the face of the constant winds of protest and criticism.” That courage—along with wisdom and compassion—shines out from every page of The People’s Justice. At the heart of this book is the question: Would you want to live in Justice Thomas’s America? After reading these stories, even his critics might be surprised by their answer.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

In the context of sustainable development, recent land debates tend to construct two porous camps. On the one side, norms of land justice and their advocates dictate that people’s rights to tenure security are tantamount and even sometimes key to successful conservation practice. On the other hand, biodiversity protection and conservation advocates, supported by global environmental organizations and states, remain committed to conservation strategies, steeped in genetics and biological sciences, working on behalf of a "global" mandate for biodiversity and climate change mitigation. Land Rights, Biodiversity Conservation and Justice seeks to illuminate struggles for land and territory in the context of biodiversity conservation. This edited volume explores the particular ideologies, narratives and practices that are mobilized when the agendas of biodiversity conservation practice meet, clash, and blend with the demands for land and access and control of resources from people living in, and in close proximity, to parks. The book maintains that while biodiversity conservation is an important goal in a time where climate change is a real threat to human existence, the successful and just future of biodiversity conservation is contingent upon land tenure security for local people. The original research gathered together in this volume will be of considerable interest to researchers of development studies, political ecology, land rights, and conservation.

For millennia, plants and their habitats have been fundamental to the lives of Indigenous Peoples - as sources of food and nutrition, medicines, and technological materials - and central to ceremonial traditions, spiritual beliefs, narratives, and language. While the First Peoples of Canada and other parts of the world have developed deep cultural understandings of plants and their environments, this knowledge is often underrecognized in debates about land rights and title, reconciliation, treaty negotiations, and traditional territories. Plants, People, and Places argues that the time is long past due to recognize and accommodate Indigenous Peoples' relationships with plants and their ecosystems. Essays in this volume, by leading voices in philosophy, Indigenous law, and environmental sustainability, consider the critical importance of botanical and ecological knowledge to land rights and related legal and government policy, planning, and decision making in Canada, the United States, Sweden, and New Zealand. Analyzing specific cases in which Indigenous Peoples' inherent rights to the environment have been denied or restricted, this collection promotes future prosperity through more effective and just recognition of the historical use of and care for plants in Indigenous cultures. A timely book featuring Indigenous perspectives on reconciliation, environmental sustainability, and pathways toward ethnoecological restoration, Plants, People, and Places reveals how much there is to learn from the history of human relationships with nature.

Extending law beyond the human, the book probes the conceptual openings, methodological challenges and ethical conundrums of law in a time of deep socio-ecological disturbances and transitions. How do we learn and practice law across epistemic and ontological difference? What sort of methodologies do we need? In what sense does conjuring other-than-human beings as sentient, cognitive and social agents— rather than mere recipients of state-sanctioned rights—transform what we mean by “law” and “rights of nature”? Legal institutions exclusively focused on human perspectives seem insufficiently capable of addressing current socio-ecological challenges in Latin America and beyond. In response, this book strives to integrate other-than-human beings within legal thinking and decision-making protocols. Weaving together various fields of knowledge and world-making practices that include—but are not limited to—Indigenous legal traditions, Earth Law and multispecies ethnography, Law, Humans and Plants focuses on the entanglement of law, ecology and Indigenous cosmologies in Southern Colombia. In so doing, it articulates a general postanthropocentric legal theory which is proposed, a tool to address socioecological challenges such as climate change and bio-cultural loss. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the disciplines of environmental law, Earth Law and ecological law, legal theory and critical legal studies as well as others working in the in the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental humanities, legal anthropology and sustainability and climate change justice.

​This book provides a new interpretation of international law specifically dedicated to Indigenous peoples in the context of a climate justice approach. The book presents a critical analysis of past and current developments at the intersection of human rights and international environmental law and governance. The book suggests new ways forward and demonstrates the need for a paradigmatic shift that would enhance the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples as fundamental actors in the conservation of biodiversity and in the fight against climate change. The book offers guidance on a number of critical intersecting and interdependent issues at the forefront of climate change law and policy – inside and outside of the UN climate change regime. The author suggests that the adoption of a critical perspective on international law is needed in order to highlight inherent structural and systemic issues of the international law regime which are all issues that ultimately impede the pursue of climate justice for Indigenous peoples.