Colonialism and environmental harm

Gustavo Rojas-Páez recently posted "Whose Nature? Whose Rights? Criminalization of Social Protest in a Globalizing World". In it he asks:

Why has the law historically taken both social and environmental harm for granted? Who has benefited from the historical silences of the law in regard to social suffering and environmental harm? The answer to these questions, while not straightforward, lies largely in the restricted way in which nature’s relationship with human beings has been theorized by social science and legal scholarship.

The article goes on to discuss Vattel, Grotius, the School of Salamanca, and their connections to contemporary conflicts over natural resources in places such as Bolivia and Columbia.