What does it mean to give rights to the other-than-human world? Where does the idea that people “give” rights come from, and what are the alternatives? Are rights a useful way to imagine an ethical relationship between humans and nature?

These are the core questions of my current research, focused on the Yukon River watershed. Running from headwaters in British Columbia through the Yukon Territory to the Alaska coastline, the watershed is tied together by hydrological cycles and the biological life – the forests, salmon, birds and caribou, and other species - that make their lives along its course.

The Yukon also flows through multiple Indigenous homelands, including those of the Yup’ik, Tagish, Tlingit, Koyukon, and Gwitch’in. These nations defined the region’s politics, systems of value, and resource use prior to the 1700s, and, along much of the river and its tributaries, are today the watershed’s primary residents. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Indigenous ways of governance met with imperial ideas, as the British Empire expanded westward the Russian Empire moved east from Siberia. Both introduced new concepts of rights. Then in 1867, after Russia sold Alaska to the United States and Canada was granted self-governance, the Yukon watershed was divided between nation-state legal regimes.

This past makes the Yukon watershed a transnational ecological space that has encountered varied concepts and concrete enactments of rights. These ideas had ecological consequences, from changing hunting techniques and uses of canines by Indigenous nations in the 1700s to trapping and placer mining in the 1800s to commercial fishing and timbering in the 1900s. This makes the Yukon watershed a rich space to examine how ideas of what a person is, and what their duties to others are, influence environmental change – and how the environment might provoke local or regional adaptations to rights concepts.

Beyond the Yukon River, I am developing a project on the history of early experiences of climate change, beginning in the 1980s and stretching to the present, in the US and Russian Arctic.