1 May 2025. Racializing Nature and Naturalizing Race: Consumption and Waste in International Law with Usha Natarajan
10 - 11 am AEST, Online
The way people treat each other and the way we treat our environment are inextricable and 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 evade accountability for its racism and environmental harms. This article explores the legal techniques of comparison, objectification, exploitation, taming, and extermination that produce both racist and environmentally harmful outcomes. The racialization of nature and naturalization of race through international law depends on the erasure of subaltern worldviews. But another international law is possible where diverse legal traditions heretofore silenced play their part in structuring more sustainable and equitable global relations on their own terms. Such a transformation entails understanding the links and consolidating solidarity between anti-racist and environmentalist spaces of law and policymaking, scholarship, and activism.
This is an online event. Registration required.