Work-in-Progress: A People’s Environmental Paradigm

A People’s Environmental Paradigm: Law, Class Struggle, and The Inside/Outside Strategy

Abstract

In an era of intensifying ecological breakdown—as quantified by the surpassing of earth’s planetary boundaries—genuine systemic re-formations, and not mere reforms, are required to achieve ecologically viable and socially liberatory futures. Drawing on critical environmental legal theory in the ecosocialist tradition, this Article explores the central force that can drive such systemic change: modes of bottom-up “class struggle.” This Article then proposes novel mechanisms to achieve such change in the form of transformative iterations of the “inside/outside strategy.”

This Article, first, defines what is denoted by bottom-up, ecosocialist class struggle in the contemporary context. This concept encompasses the broad working and popular classes in the United States (i.e., which are of significant proportion multiracial and women), striving toward liberation. Bottom-up class struggle also is internationalist, especially foregrounding peasant, Indigenous, and other popular struggles in the Global South. In furtherance of system change, this Article, next, examines how emancipatory class struggle can be built and operationalized both within and beyond environmental legal channels through inside/outside strategies.

As conceptualized in this Article, inside strategies view environmental law as contingent and as a terrain of transformative class struggle. Outside strategies work beyond formal legal channels to build extra-institutional class power. Inside/outside strategies, moreover, are designed to work together in potent and dual-reinforcing concert. As a concrete illustration of the inside/outside strategy, this Article proposes novel iterations of “Green Universal Basic Services” as a liberatory legal and policy regime as entwined with extra-institutional power-building (e.g., “Green People’s Assemblies”). Ultimately, such an inside/outside strategy works towards a genuinely radical paradigm—a people’s environmentalism—as required in our era of Anthropocene crisis.