(Un)Natural Law: Environmental Governance in the Owens Valley, California

This dissertation examines the emergent forms and techniques of environmental governance as they unfold in the Owens Valley, California. Drawing from ethnographic and historical research, the dissertation asks how law addresses issues of conservation and sustainability, and also how interlocking human and natural communities are to be organized and controlled. Bringing together studies of governance with sociolegal studies, the dissertation goes beyond the boundaries of a single discipline to present a wide array of possibilities for understanding law’s conceptualization, interpretation, and practice. Three substantive chapters trace the confluence of environmental law, environmental conflict, and the environment-centered perspectives, practices, and promises prevalent in everyday life. Examining the interstices and intersections between these reveals the ways in which law shapes not only the processes and power of regulation, but also the very subject of that regulation: the environment itself. By uncovering those processes, this dissertation challenges the pervasive idea that governance over the environment can be disentangled from governance over people and things. The dissertation thus offers new insights into doctrinal and policy disputes in environmental law and proposes a significant alternative to the hyper-technical, formalistic, and economic approaches that dominate the study of environmental regulation