“I Have a Dream”: Erasing American Ecophobia

Abstract

Considering the institutionalized forms of ecophobia in the United States, is it necessary to enact a Civil Rights of Nature?1 Only one year after Rachel Carson predicted how pollution would make environmental life-forms go “out of kilter” in her 1962 text Silent Spring, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech at the March on Washington reminded the nation that despite the Constitution’s “promissory note” guaranteeing every American “unalienable rights,” millions of Americans continued to practice the injustices inherent in the “shameful” bias of racism. Speaking one hundred years after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream …” speech emphasized the classes of people in the twentieth century who comprised Americans: “black men” and white men” and women and children; in stressing the unequal treatment of the nation’s African Americans, King’s speech forecasted the enforcement of protections in the coming civil rights movement: “there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge.” When the desire for equality sparked the US Civil Rights Movement, it transfigured the theory of equal rights into practice with the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.2 In this article, I employ notions of equality and discrimination that have been embedded in the US civil rights movement to theorize that nature should be given equal rights of protection under the Constitution. I claim that conceptually linking the Constitutional protections enabled by the American civil rights movement to an emerging civil rights of nature would enable the rapid transition away from ecophobic attitudes toward anti-naturism laws that help restore, redress, and revitalize US ecologies. After all, since the US Constitution secures for Americans a “Supreme Law of the Land,” shouldn’t that law of the land protect the environment on which it is anchored?