Journals
Fall 2002, Vol. 42, No. 4
An Essay on Environmental Justice: The Past, the Present, and Back to the Future
Eileen Gauna
Race, Ethnicity, and Natural Resources in the United States: A Review
John Schelhas
The United States is a racially and ethnically diverse country, but only recently have researchers and scholars paid much attention to the significance of this diversity for natural resource management and policy. This article reviews the literature on racial discrimination and ethnic differences in valuing and using natural resources. The review indicates that the effects of past and current racial discrimination and ethnocentrism in the natural resource field continue to be felt today, both in individual behavior and in social structures. The review also finds complex linkages between culture and values, natural resource uses, social organization, and ecosystem characteristics that highlight the need for serious attention to racial and ethnic diversity in natural resource management and policy. Ethnocentrism in the natural resource field comes into play in many ways but may be most pernicious in cases of scientific uncertainty when managers and policy makers tend to fall back on culturally and professionally coded models that may have biases built into them. There is a need for greater attention to race and ethnicity by all in the natural resource field, and also for greater diversity among professionals in the field itself. A broader and more inclusive view of natural resource values, use, and management will both better serve a diverse U.S. population and attract more diversity to the natural resource professions.
Constructive Conquest in the Courts: A Legal History of the Western Shoshone Lands Struggle—1861 to 1991
John D. O’Connell
Late in the twentieth century federal law courts found that the Western Shoshone still had title to millions of acres of putative public lands in Nevada. However, a claim alleging that the United States had long ago taken all Western Shoshone lands had been filed in the Indian Claims Commission by a tribal government representing only a portion of the tribe. Other Western Shoshone and the tribal government that had filed the claim were not allowed to correct the claim or to refuse the award to protect existing title. Ultimately the courts decided that the fictional nineteenth-century confiscation, assumed by the Claims Commission, would have to be made reality, even as to lands continuously in Indian possession. Congress must now act to correct this manifest injustice and to allow the Western Shoshone to retain an adequate land base.
The Indian Wars: Efforts to Resolve Western Shoshone Land and Treaty Issues and to Distribute the Indian Claims Commission Judgment Fund
Thomas E. Luebben & Cathy Nelson
International human rights agencies have found the United States in violation of international treaties and human rights standards by denying the Western Shoshone Nation the use of their ancestral lands. The 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley did not cede any Western Shoshone land to the United States, nor did it purport to "take" or "extinguish" Western Shoshone aboriginal Indian title. Nonetheless, all Western Shoshone tribes and communities combined now hold less than 28,000 acres of Indian trust lands, about five one-hundredths of their ancestral territory in Idaho, Nevada, and California. The Western Shoshone require a much larger land base to survive culturally and economically in the twenty-first century. Three decades of continuous litigation and political conflict with the federal government have been punctuated by dramatic seizures of Shoshone livestock by the Bureau of Land Management. Efforts to legislate distribute of a $26 million 1979 Indian Claims Commission award for a fictional federal "taking" of Western Shoshone land have failed because of strong opposition from Western Shoshone tribal governments and political organizations demanding a land base and recognition of aboriginal rights. Efforts to negotiate a resolution of these issues have been unsuccessful because the federal government has never made an equitable offer. It is incumbent upon the U.S. Congress to secure a culturally and economically adequate land base for the Western Shoshone Nation.
Andrade Mesa Wetlands of the All-American Canal
Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, Pamela L. Nagler, Yamilett Carrillo-Guerrero, Enrique Zamora-Hernández, Jaqueline García-Hernández, Francisco Zamora-Arroyo, Kara Gillon, & Edward P. Glenn
Seepage from the All-American Canal has created a series of wetlands totaling over 6200 hectares (15,500 acres) along the U.S.–Mexico border. Over half of these are in Mexico, east of the portion of the canal that is proposed for lining, and will therefore be impacted by lack of further seepage. The Andrade Mesa Wetlands are extensive and provide high-quality bird habitat in an isolated part of the northern Colorado River delta where replacement habitat is non-existent. The loss of this critical habitat should be considered in assessing the potential environmental impacts of the canal lining project.
The Measure of Indian Water Rights: The Arizona Homeland Standard, Gila River Adjudication
Barbara A. Cosens
On November 26, 2001, the Arizona Supreme Court concluded that Indian reservations were established as homelands. By articulating a homeland standard for the measure of reserved water rights based on tribal economic development plans, cultural needs, and historic water uses, the Arizona Supreme Court has eliminated many of the blatant inequities plaguing the current approach to Indian water rights quantification. Nevertheless, there are concerns with wholesale adoption of the Arizona standard, including the effect on those who have devoted resources in reliance on the previous standard, the introduction of uncertainty in the method of quantification, and the impact on federal funding. Courts may address these concerns by retaining the current practicably irrigable standard for quantification of the agricultural water right, and by turning to experience gained in settlement processes to quantify other aspects of a homeland water right. The effect of the standard on the method for calculation of federal funding to develop Indian water highlights the need to change that method to reflect the obligation to provide the water infrastructure necessary to render a reservation a home.
Western Urban Water Demand
David S. Brookshire, H. Stuart Burness, Janie M. Chermak, Kate Krause
Increasing concern with sustainability issues has raised questions regarding western water use. Efficient water allocation requires policy tools based on the value of water in alternative uses: agricultural, environmental, residential, and others. Agricultural values are fairly well established. Environmental values are recognized as "non-market" and estimated with various alternative techniques. Residential uses are normally thought to be market determined, but these markets are often restricted, allowing the possibility that water charges may not accurately reflect the value of water. This article reviews the history of urban residential water data analyses in order to address this and related issues and to ascertain the efficacy of extant databases. We then investigate the viability of estimated demand relationships and the robustness of these estimates to potential policy needs. We also discuss relevant conceptual issues for effective water policy formulation and their role in remedying data inadequacies and provide some gross estimates for water prices that include all relevant costs. Finally, we synthesize the data review and conceptual issues to identify the requirements for broadening the urban-residential water database. Efficient water pricing in environments where water is "scarce" relies on rules that modify extant pricing practices to include a scarcity value. The process has implications for empirical analyses; therefore, we sketch some alternatives for conducting these analyses that could assist policy makers in making difficult water pricing decisions.
The Administration of the Middle Rio Grande Basin: 1956–2002
Celina A. Jones
The Middle Rio Grande Administrative guidelines issued in 2000 by the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer mark an important milestone in the management of the water resources of New Mexico’s most populated region. The basin was originally declared in 1956, and the State Engineer relied on hydrologic principles to craft a management plan that allowed for expanded use of groundwater pumping in addition to existing use of the fully appropriated Rio Grande surface water. New Mexico courts upheld the authority of the State Engineer to exercise broad jurisdiction over the appropriation of ground water and to make technical decisions about the proper management of individual basins. The new guidelines add key components to administrative planning. They close important segments of the basin to new appropriations and change the conditions that apply to pending groundwater permits; applicants are now required to obtain surface water rights to offset groundwater use prior to the granting of a permit. Through an examination of the original plan and a description of the hydrologic principles upon which the plan was founded, the new guidelines can be viewed as an essential component of the original plan to temporarily allow expanded water use in the basin, and then gradually curtail use as surface water rights are retired to offset the impacts to the river of groundwater pumping.
The Extension of Legal Rights to Animals under a Caring Ethic: An Ecofeminist Exploration of Steven Wise’s Rattling the Cage
Katrina M. Albright
In his book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, Steven M. Wise argues that nonhuman animals should be counted as persons under the law, therefore granting them legal standing in the American court system. Wise advocates the immediate extension of legal rights to chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), on the basis that these animals possess mental capacities that would allow them to pass current standard tests for personhood. Wise’s theory presents a framework for extending legal protections to animals based on the values currently embraced by the American legal system. However, this approach extends legal rights to select species of animals that are deemed to possess rationality. Ecofeminist reform of the American legal system would build upon Wise’s theory and expand legal protections for many more species of animals.
Ecofeminism draws connections between the domination over women and the domination over nature and nonhuman animals. It identifies Western patriarchal value systems as the common source of cultural validation of environmental destruction and violence against women and animals. Ecofeminist animal welfare theorists criticize the classic concept of animal "rights," which places importance on the idea that rationality and sentience of animals is similar to human reason. Animal "rights" theory, as it is used both in Wise’s book and in the animal welfare movement in general, therefore withholds protections from those animals that fail a "rationality" test. Moving away from animal rights dialogue, then, ecofeminists instead embrace a "feminist caring ethic." A caring ethic recognizes animals’ inherent right to bodily security and integrity based not on their rationality, but instead on their emotional lives and relationships with humans, as well as on humans’ ethical responsibilities to end animal suffering.
Recognition of ecofeminist values in the American legal system would reject the rationality standard currently required in personhood status and in Wise’s theory, and would expand legal rights to animals based on emotional relationships and moral responsibilities.
The State of the Natural Resources Literature – Water Works
G. Emlen Hall
