Legalities of Nature: Law, Empire, and Wilderness Landscapes in Canada

Abstract

In this article, I trace the tangled relationships between law, nature, and empire as they figure in Canadian national geographies, imagined and real. While the nature-culture dichotomy has long been contested by cultural geographers, anthropologists, and historians, to date, socio-legal scholars and legal theorists have spent less time problematizing the law-nature distinction. With the exception of natural law, law and nature are commonly perceived to be opposing and ontologically distinct. In this article, I argue that law, nature, and empire have overlapping genealogies that demand critical attention. Law and nature, I contend, are ontologically related categories that shape the Canadian nation by working in and through each other. While both are prominent symbols in the national imaginary, real spaces of nature—wilderness landscapes, including parks—are also legal constructs that normalize nature as law's constitutive exterior and as the nation's myth of (empty) origins.