Student Column: Perspectives on the Environment and the Law | Protect or Develop? What the Debates Reveal
In this post, Emma DuCharme, a 2L law student at Lakehead University’s Bora Laskin Faculty of Law, shares what she took away from the second day of our 2025 Annual Conference on Environment and Law, combining personal reflections with key moments from the discussions.
Between Law and the Land: Reflections on Day Two of the CIAJ “Environment and the Law” Conference
The second day of the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice’s 49th annual conference on Environment and the Law began with a question: what does it mean to make a “good” decision in the context of natural resource development? This question became the thread that tied together the day’s discussions about reconciliation, responsibility, and the moral weight of law in shaping our relationship with the environment. As a Registered Professional Forester, I found the presentations on Day 2 of the conference to be insightful. The discussions challenged me to reflect upon my own professional training in resource management.
Morning of Day 2: Indigenous Approaches to Environmental Law
Aimee Craft began by discussing how we think about environmental decision-making. She suggested that the word “choice” lies at the heart of the conversation between law and the environment: choice in how we define progress, choice in who makes decisions, and choice in whether development should proceed at all. For Craft, environmental law must exist beyond a regulatory exercise to one grounded in relationships with land, water, and with the non-human beings who share these spaces with us.
Her research on decolonizing water governance and her work on an upcoming book about “good development” were introduced as practical pathways for restoring Indigenous jurisdiction. She argued that Canada’s legal frameworks often fragment land and water into discrete “resources,” each subject to a separate ministry or statute. Indigenous law, by contrast, understands these systems as interdependent and alive. The Magpie River in northern Quebec, which was a river granted legal personhood through a collaboration between the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality, was cited as an example of this worldview in action: a river recognized not as property, but as a rights-bearing being with its own spirit and agency. As a Registered Professional Forester, this perspective challenged my own biases of viewing land, water, and trees through ecological management frameworks.
The session was optimistic in tone but not without realism. Craft acknowledged the growing recognition of Indigenous values in Canadian environmental governance but expressed concern about Parliament’s new Building Canada Act, which may fast-track project approvals and reduce Indigenous participation to a mere formality. “The crux,” she said, “is in the decision-making process itself. Who decides, and for whom?” Her call for focusing on inherent Indigenous jurisdiction, especially where power is imbalanced, was a powerful reminder that reconciliation requires more than consultation; it requires shifting authority.
Storytelling as Law: The RELAW Workshop
The mid-morning RELAW (Revitalizing Indigenous Law for Land, Air and Water) workshop, led by Eugene Kung and Katha Lafferty from West Coast Environmental Law, provided a deeply reflective complement to Craft’s theoretical framing. Rather than delivering a lecture, the facilitators invited us all into an Indigenous legal education practice that blends narrative, ethics, and law.
The workshop began with a discussion of John Borrows’ five sources of Indigenous law: positivistic, customary, natural, sacred, and deliberative. Kung and Lafferty explained that Indigenous legal orders are not static archives of stories but living systems that guide conduct, allocate responsibilities, and define justice. They described RELAW’s role in helping Indigenous communities bring these laws to life by developing water laws, supporting Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs), and building governance frameworks grounded in Indigenous ethics.
Central to the session was the idea that stories are laws in motion. We listened to the Dene story of the Woman of Metals, followed by a recording of Gabriel George Sr. telling the story of Waut-Salk and the Salmon, first shared during the National Energy Board hearings on the Trans Mountain Pipeline in 2014. These stories were not treated as folklore but as case law in oral form, containing rules about accountability, reciprocity, and autonomy among both human and non-human beings.
Afterward, we discussed the layers of meaning within the stories: what does it mean to act with reciprocity toward salmon? How does the autonomy of non-human beings shape our legal obligations? What happens when development disrupts the balance between them?
As one participant noted during the discussion, “Ethics in Indigenous law are not abstract principles; they come with permission.” The important takeaway is that citing Indigenous stories, songs, or ceremonies requires consent from knowledge holders, just as one would seek permission before quoting a legal scholar. It was a powerful message about intellectual humility and respect for living legal traditions.
Defining the Public Interest on Public Lands
After lunch, the conversation pertained to more conventional environmental law terrain but with the same underlying tension between competing visions of the public good. The panel on “Defining the Public Interest on Public Lands” brought together representatives from government, industry, and Indigenous organizations to examine how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) can better reflect Indigenous and community values.
The panelists agreed that environmental decision-making must evaluate cumulative effects, which is the combined impact of multiple projects over time, and that consultation with First Nations is an essential part of the process. The province of British Columbia and the federal government are striving to align with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) through consensus-based processes. Yet the same optimism was tempered by unease: would the Building Canada Act undermine these efforts by reducing consultation timelines in the name of efficiency?
Still, the panel ended on a hopeful note. There was consensus that Indigenous-led environmental assessments offer a promising model for future collaboration. The message that was inculcated in me after this discussion was that we need to move from consultation to collaboration, and from collaboration to shared authority.
Balancing Protection and Prosperity
The final session of the day addressed an important, contentious question of the conference: how can we balance environmental protection with economic development? Panelists acknowledged the irony that the pursuit of prosperity often increases the demand for energy, even as global markets signal a decline in non-renewable resource consumption. Projections showed decreasing reliance on oil and gas, yet political momentum continues to push for infrastructure that assumes their longevity.
I found this presentation to be both optimistic and pessimistic. Some saw a path forward through renewable energy investments, Indigenous partnership models, and new frameworks for sustainability-driven growth. Others warned that the political will to streamline development risks undermining environmental protections and accelerating the approval of projects without proper scrutiny. The message I retained from this presentation was that everything has a cost, not just in dollars, but in ecosystems, in trust, and in time.
Development will continue, but the legitimacy of decision-making processes must be inclusive and ethical. It is not an “either/or” between the economy and the environment. It is a question of whether both can co-exist.
Concluding Reflections
By the end of the day, I realized that every session had been circling around the same idea: balance. The law often privileges human voices and economic metrics. Yet the speakers challenged us to imagine a more relational system: one that listens to rivers, honours the animals, and measures prosperity in the health of the land itself.
Day Two of the conference reminded me that optimism in environmental law does not come from denying the scale of the challenges ahead, but from believing in our collective capacity to make better choices.
About the author
Emma DuCharme
Emma is a 2L law student at Lakehead University’s Bora Laskin Faculty of Law, focusing on environmental and natural resource law. Originally from North Bay, Ontario, she spent most of her 20s in British Columbia where she worked as a tree planter before becoming a Registered Professional Forester. She is now building on that experience through her legal studies, bridging her forestry background with advocacy and policy in natural resource law.