Environmental Racism and Co-evolution in the Book Environmental Ethics for Canadians

Chapter 8 Case Study Critique
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Chapter 8 Case Study Critique
This is the case study for Chapter 8 of Environmental Ethics for Canadians (2nd edition). The case study explores the issues of land, language, and residential schools that sparked outrage in the country and forced the prime minister to offer an official apology. The case study argues that these government efforts were based on the broad assumption that the Natives were inferior and had to be made to assimilate to the superior culture. Most importantly, the case study condemns the efforts to deprive the First Nations people of their language, tied to their knowledge of the land. To understand these arguments, the themes of environmental racism and co-evolution as discussed in the chapter can expound on the main points in the case study.
The case study shows the need to observe eco-evolution, which has been described as the process where a population of organisms develops practices or traits in response to another population. The hint of this theme in the case study is made when the author claims that there is no separation between knowledge of the land and how the First Nations people have named its features in their language (Williston, 2016, p. 232). In other words, the case study insinuates that the aboriginals have evolved alongside the land that they have occupied for thousands of years, which means that their traits and practices are dependent on other species that occupy the same land. Therefore, the case study holds that depriving them of their language is equivalent to denying them the sense of the place that has defined them for millennia, an idea supported by such scholars as Jensen et al. (2021, p. 93). This de...