On the Rights of Nature and their Criminalized Excess

• In Event: Finitude in Other Terms: Uncommoning Extinction - II

Abstract

On April 5, 2018, the Supreme Court of Colombia declared the Amazon a subject of constitutional rights after a group of youth sued the State, arguing that it had not efficiently addressed the problem of deforestation and demanding that it protect not only their but also the right of future generations to a healthy environment. The decision builds on the court’s judgment in 2016 that granted legal rights to the Atrato River; however, unlike this previous case, which was impelled by the local communities of the watershed, the granting of rights to the Amazon was decided in Bogotá, obligating municipal governments and the inhabitants of the region to follow suit. In this paper, through ethnographic engagement in Puerto Guzmán Putumayo, I discuss the contradictory dynamics that emerged in a process to include community participation in the updating of a municipal territorial land use plan in the Amazon – an action plan that is a requirement dictated by the 2018 court sentence. Within Colombia’s post peace accord scenario, I pose questions about the way constitutional turns to the “rights of nature” interact with transitional justice processes in territories that have been the epicenter of the country’s social and armed conflict. I also discuss the perpetuation of violence and new risks of exclusion that may result when environmental protection measures and climate change mitigation strategies both do and do not change hands from paralegal-armed actors to police and military forces of the State.

Author

• Kristina Lyons, University of Pennsylvania