Literature Review

U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstein (both D-Calif.) introduced the Pala Band of Mission Indians Land Transfer Act of 2023, which would place approximately 720 acres of ancestral lands in San Diego County that are adjacent to the Pala Band of Mission Indian’s existing reservation into trust for the Tribe. The legislation was previously introduced in the House of Representatives by Congressmen Darrell Issa (R-Calif.-48) and Juan Vargas (D-Calif.-52).

Evidence of Indigenous peoples living in the Louisiana area date back to more than ten thousand years before the first European explorers arrived in the area. Hernando de Soto’s expedition found several villages along the Mississippi River and when European colonization began, historians estimate that nearly 15,000 native people resided in Louisiana (National Park Service). These numbers drastically diminished as colonization brought on warfare, disease, and displacement, but there are still many tribes residing in Louisiana that now face challenges to their sacred sites and culture with concerns including coastal erosion, influences of the oil industry, and the commercialization of the natural landscape of Louisiana.

President Joe Biden committed to protecting Spirit Mountain and the surrounding area in Nevada, a sacred site for the Fort Mojave and other Native American tribal nations.

NALT Conservation Biologist Matt Stutzman visited the 2,400-acre Santa Susana conservation area located in Ventura County, California. In 2017, The Boeing Company permanently conserved the property, which supported research and development essential to America’s space program. The property is now home to mountain lions, bobcats, pollinators, bats, and approximately 135 species of birds.

NALC works to ensure tribal peoples have access to those sites, Przeklasa said, and that, if they're in private hands, they are discovered and transferred back to tribes or the organization to ensure proper stewardship.

As Earthjustice built its legal case to protect the Badger-Two Medicine area, the Blackfeet Nation built a movement, drawn together by collective outrage over the oil industry’s demands to drill a treasured landscape.

From Ethiopia’s highlands to Siberia to the Australian rainforest, there are thousands of sacred forests that have survived thanks to traditional religious and spiritual beliefs. Experts say these places, many now under threat, have ecological importance and must be saved.

How do you advocate over ownership over something that can’t be owned? This is the dilemma of sacred sites. When sacred land, like that of Avi Kwa Ame (Spirit Mountain), is under threat of defacement through private land bids, what is a sufficient way to advocate for something that can feel so intangibly powerful and culturally, spiritually important?

The recent proposal by an International Expert Panel to include the crime of ecocide in the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute has raised expectations for preventing and remedying severe environmental harm through international prosecution in the Anthropocene. As alluring as this image is, however, we argue that ecocide prosecutions may be the most difficult, perhaps even impossible, in precisely the cases that the ICC would be most concerned with, namely, the gravest global incidents of environmental damage, especially those associated with planetary climate change. Here, we explore a series of questions about the Panel’s formulation of ecocide that resonate with longer debates around criminalizing environmental harm but take on new dimensions amidst global climatic disruption and after twenty years of ICC trials. Ecocide must thus contend with the hard lessons learned concerning the ICC’s limitations in realizing justice in a fraught international political context and also fundamental challenges to knowledge arising from the dynamic ecology and uncertainty of the Anthropocene. The proposed amendment, if adopted, risks ineffective prosecutions or perverse outcomes for justice and even the environment itself. This risk, however, may characterize not just the Panel’s proposal but perhaps any effort to prosecute ecocide internationally in the Anthropocene.

Abstract: Crimes against the environment affect fundamental values and collective interests shared by the international community as a whole. The ‘global’ nature of the protected interests and the erga omnes character of many international environmental obligations are the main arguments in favour of the international criminalisation of certain environmental harms. This paper offers a survey of the development of international law with regard to the legal definition and consequences of environmental crimes from the perspective of both the law of state responsibility and international criminal law, up to the latest definition of ecocide and the proposal for its inclusion in the Rome Statute as formulated by the Panel of Independent Experts convened by the Stop Ecocide Foundation. In so doing, the legal regime related to environmental crimes is also considered through the environmental ethics lens, so as to evidence the progressive evolution from an anthropocentric approach to the ecocentric view which characterises the new legal definition of the crime of ecocide.

The concept of property has been the focus of recent debate in environmental ethics. Proponents of private property rights argue that private owners are likely to preserve natural areas and endangered species because they alone have to bear the costs associated with environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.1 Others argue that property rights in natural resources are limited by obligations to do justice to the interests non-owners have in ‘common goods.’2 In what follows I will broaden the debate about property in environmental ethics by suggesting a very different way that private ownership could help protect natural areas and the nonhuman animals that inhabit them. As a check on human intervention in natural areas that is destructive of habitat, a nonhuman animal property rights regime (structured along the lines I suggest) can secure the maintenance of ecosystem stability and ensure the vital interests of nonhuman animals are respected. The key moral demands of environmentalism and animal rights can be met by extending the scope of property ownership beyond the human species to other sentient animals that have a vital interest in using natural goods

Nonhuman animals are things under the laws of all fifty states of the United States. Subject to relevant regulations or statute, nonhuman animals may therefore be purchased, sold, used, exploited, and killed as the owner wishes. In 2013, the Nonhuman Rights Project filed its first groundbreaking common law habeas corpus cases in New York State on behalf of imprisoned chimpanzees and sought to persuade the courts to transform their status from legal things that lack the capacity for legal rights to legal persons capable of possessing their own legal rights. 2Link to the text of the note This Article broadly explores whether a state's political subdivisions may exercise home rule jurisdiction to enact ordinances or bylaws that grant a legal right to nonhuman animals. While this Article is not premised on the granting of a specific legal right to a specific species of nonhuman animal, as such a determination will be unique to the particular municipality, it discusses why an ordinance or bylaw that enacted a law granting the right to bodily liberty to appropriate nonhuman animals within its jurisdiction would be upheld if it were challenged. This articel explores the use of a constitutional home rule as a valid legal strategy to create greater legal protections for nonhuman animals. The home rule is a legal concept that allows municipalities to govern their local affiars pursuant to the police power as they see fit. Wise considers the states with constitutional home rules as suitable candidates for pursuing this strategy. He notes that in New Mexico, a local ordinance that requires the treatment of animals as more than mere chattel to have been upheld as a valid exercise of the home rule. See, HEART ordinance, requiring humans to treat animals in a manner that reflects basic humanitarian beliefs. If home rule powers can promote the policy that animals are not to be viewed as things, or to prevent unnecessary pain in animals because of moral concerns for an animal's own well-being, it is legally permissible for a municipality to grant nonhuman animals legal rights. The challenges to the home rule strategy, given its application to regulation of animal welfare, are whether the rule would be preempted by state law (hunting, commerce) or whether the rule would have extraterritorial effects. Wise concludes that these challenges, among other constitutional challenges such as dormant commerce clause, equal protection, or the takings clause, as well as any federal preemption on the basis of animal welfare or endangered species laws, would not be successful. He concludes that a municipal ordinance pursuant to the constitutional home rule granting nonhuman animals greater legal rights, such as a quasi-vested interest as sentient chattel in human treatment or freedom from cruelty would pass muster. The states are Alaska, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennesse, and Utah.