Water Alternatives (Feb 2024)
Beyond Anthropocentrism: Water law and environmental management in the Yellowstone River Basin, USA
Abstract
Recent cross-fertilisation among the fields of critical legal geography, political ecology and environmental ethics has created opportunities to examine new legal designations for more-than-human entities such as rivers. In particular, theorisations of how more-than-human assemblages ontologically co-constitute the law challenge interpretations of legal structures as purely human creations and encourage scholars to examine manifestations of non-anthropocentrism, which is defined here as an ethical position that elevates non-humans’ moral standing to that of humans. This article adopts an historical case study approach to examine an environmental conflict that occurred in the 1970s involving non-anthropocentrism and Montana water law. Specifically, this article draws from critical legal geography’s understanding of the law and the environment as being co-constituted to argue that both elements of a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic and the influence of Yellowstone River as a more-than-human entity shaped Montana Fish and Game’s position during the Yellowstone River Basin water reservation process. This article further argues that the combination of these influences affected legal interpretation of the 1973 Montana Water Use Act’s 'minimum stream flow' text and helped reconstitute the Act to include non-anthropocentric elements.
