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Abstract

In the age of intensifying anthropogenic climate change, an ecosophical shift is required in the epistemological and ontological comprehension of the interrelations between the human and non-human worlds. This shift is essential for refining existing social scientific approaches to investigating and adjudicating questions of environmental governance, environmental justice, environmental sovereignty, in addition to advancing democratic counters to the effects of ecological degradation and environmental catastrophe that move beyond rigid political-economic constraints. This essay constitutes a novel engagement with discourses of radical democracy and radical ecology that applies the philosophical method of dialectical naturalism to an ecosophical interpretation of the human-nature relation as it is expressed in historical examples of Indigenous political thought and recent examples of red praxis. The Sioux of the Great Plains region of the United States and the Māori of New Zealand (Aotearoa) furnish the case examples for this global juxtaposition. The concept of nature’s legal personhood developed in Māori legal thought offers a vivid contrast to the anthropocentric legal provisions of federal statute that delineate and constrain environmental justice in the United States. Indigenous political thought and red praxis unmask how juridical directives fail to check the arbitrary exercise of government authority and negligent expedience of private capital. The law in this neoliberal and settler-colonial tradition amounts to a Janus-faced arbiter with the capacity to either facilitate ecological degradation and the erosion of environmental sovereignty or ameliorate and prevent environmental catastrophe. The latter aim is nuanced through the incorporation of Indigenous ways of knowing and being into the normative democratic conception of environmental justice. By applying dialectical naturalism to the juridical dimension of environmental governance in two distinct democratic regimes, this essay seeks to substantiate the claims that bringing a global range of Indigenous ways of knowing and being into reforms of a hegemonic rule of law directs both a practical and epistemic challenge at the durability and tenability of the normative institutions of environmental governance in the Anthropocene.

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