The Duty to Consult on Natural Resources: Giving Substance to Procedural Rights

Awareness of climate change and its numerous, serious impacts has recently intensified across all segments of society. Both the impacts and the awareness are particularly acute among native peoples throughout North America due to their closeness to the earth. These impacts range from flooding of traditional villages, drought that endangers both subsistence crops and cultural practices that depend on the natural environment, and migration of wild life outside reservation boundaries. As a result tribes are working both individually and collectively to respond to the reality of global warming. First, tribes are working to lessen their already relatively modest carbon footprint, with efforts ranging from equipping tribal housing with solar power to investing in wind energy (Native Winds, Inc.) and growing trees for carbon sequestration, hoping to generate marketable carbon credits (Nez Perce Tribe). Second, tribes are working to develop ways of adapting to the reality of global warming, both for themselves and for the wildlife which are endangered by climate change. These efforts focus on legal as well as non-legal mechanisms, from passage of tribal ordinances to law suits against large green house gas generators, to cooperative agreements with the state and federal wildlife agencies and NGOs