Environmental law is not just fights in court. Filling ration card form is also legal aid

New Delhi: Climate law is sexy. With that declaration, Arpitha Kodiveri had her audience hooked at the launch of her book, Governing Forests on 9 January.

“Right now there’s an idea of a sexy climate lawyer, but the environmental lawyer… the idea has gone away,” said Kodiveri, an environmental lawyer and assistant professor of political science at Vassar College in the United States.

“The idea is that traditional environmental lawyers have not saved the day. This profession is not about shabby lawyering but corporate accountability, politics, power,” she told the group of students, lawyers, activists and readers perched on colourful chairs at Lodhi Colony’s The Bookshop Inc.

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Sitting against a backdrop of rows upon rows of children’s books, Kodiveri discussed her work as an environmental lawyer and legal scholar with publisher and founder of Yoda Press Arpita Das. In a free-wheeling conversation, they discussed Kodiveri’s experiences with communities she embedded herself in for research and advocacy over the years, the rapidly changing discourse on climate law, the Forest Rights Act, and the balance between activism, scholarship, and lawyering.

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Governing Forests offers a story of hope in a landscape that is increasingly apocalyptic in nature. And that was the tone of the conversation, too. Kodiveri does not claim to have the answers, but her insights offered glimmers of solutions that could be applied in environmental law, activism and conservation.

One solution was to open environmental law clinics at major law schools where students can have hands-on training and work with community-based environmental lawyers. She also cited examples of governments and organisations trying to gather indigenous knowledge on how to tackle and even mitigate climate disasters like forest fires.

Also read: Uttarakhand’s ticking time bomb: Landslide lakes

Beyond lawyering

Kodiveri spoke about her time as a Young India Fellow at Ashoka University in 2011, where she attended a course on sociology of environment by professor Amita Baviskar. That set her on a path beyond lawyering and petitioning to courts.

“When I thought of pursuing a career in environmental law, it was primarily litigation. But I didn’t want to litigate because when I looked at ecological conflicts they felt so complex that an adversarial forum didn’t quite fit the bill for me,” she said.

Over the years, Kodiveri worked with communities in Rajasthan, Karnataka and Odisha to name a few. She also advocated for a democratic approach to environmental law, which takes into account the wisdom of indigenous communities.

Kodiveri, Das, and other environment lawyers at the gathering also discussed how the law is limping behind rapid changes in science and knowledge about the climate crisis. But Kodiveri cautioned against hasty, and sweeping decisions.

There is a tendency in climate law and policy discourse to bat for authoritarian environmental governance to create massive structural changes. “There’s a valorisation of the Chinese environmental law model, which has taken democratic rights away completely. There’s a discourse that environmental law is lethargic, highly bureaucratic and slow, but maybe we do need to slow down,” she said.

“The struggle against authoritarian governments has always come from environmental movements,” she added.

Also read: Climate action is the hot new career. Consultancy, communications, colleges are all in

Indigenous knowledge 

In the backdrop of forest fires in California, Das asked Kodiveri about indigenous knowledge systems and how that wisdom could help the modern world stymie such disasters which are increasing in frequency.

“Weaponisation of criminal laws has silenced indigenous knowledge globally to influence decisions on conservation,” she replied.

Kodiveri further cited examples from India, where the Soliga community in Karnataka’s BR Hills used to follow the tradition of ‘small lit firework’—burning an area of the forest down, cultivating it, and getting back to the land later on. While imperfect, Kodiveri argued this was an environmentally friendly approach to conservation.

But often such indigenous practices are criminalised by colonial era laws, Kodiveri argues that this approach has silenced this knowledge. The discourse around conservation was one of exclusion, Kodiveri said, but now the climate discourse is changing, and these questions are being looked at with a sense of urgency.

“Indigenous communities are finally being institutionalised into the treaty making process. But it’s almost like a burden on them—that indigenous knowledge is going to save the day,” she said.

Kodiveri added it is extremely important for young environmental lawyers to not just run around in courts but also in the field, alongside communities, engaging and learning from them.

“There aren’t any lawyers doing community-based environment lawyering. It’s not just legal issues… but something as simple as filling the form for a ration card, and there’s a complete dearth of that kind of legal aid.”

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)

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