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

A People’s Environmental Paradigm: Centering Class Struggle in Law and Social Change

Abstract

In an era of intensifying ecological breakdown—as quantified by the surpassing of Earth’s planetary boundaries—traditional environmental law “reform” constitutes an insufficient model. We instead require deeper systemic change, or systemic “re-formations,” of our ecological political economy as a whole. Drawing on the insights of critical environmental legal theory in the ecosocialist tradition, this Article explores the central force that can drive such systemic change: genuinely emancipatory forms of bottom-up class struggle. This Article then proposes novel mechanisms to build and operationalize such class power in the form of environmental “inside-outside strategies.”

This Article, first, explores what is denoted by bottom-up class struggle in the contemporary era. This concept encompasses the broad working or popular classes in the United States—which are by significant statistical proportion multi-racial and women—striving toward liberation. Bottom-up class struggle also is internationalist, especially foregrounding peasant, Indigenous, and other popular struggles in the Global South. Next, this Article outlines the emancipatory ends that such bottom-up class struggle can engender: A wholly new ecological political economy based on deep ecological care and restoration, collective ownership, and democratic planning (i.e., as grounded in post-growth precepts).

In furtherance of such systemic change, this Article then examines how emancipatory class struggle can be built and operationalized both within and beyond legal channels through environmental “inside-outside strategies.” Inside strategies view environmental law as contingent and as a partial terrain of radical class struggle. Outside strategies work beyond the law entirely 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 inside-outside strategies, this Article proposes novel iterations of “Green Universal Basic Services” as transformative legal strategies as entwined with extra-institutional power-building modes (e.g., “Green People’s Assemblies”). Ultimately, such class conflict-infused strategies constitute a genuinely transformative environmentalism—a people’s environmental paradigm—as required in our era of Anthropocene crisis.