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Home > Journals > WMELPR > Vol. 50 (2025-2026) > Iss. 1 (2025)

 

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Abstract

This Article reconceptualizes the theory of progressive property by juxtaposing legal theory with the empirical study of a subsistence economy in the U.S. Subarctic. Progressive property holds that owners are bound by obligations to non-owners as a means to achieve human flourishing. The theory is constrained by the primacy of private property in Western thought, and it also lacks the ecological ethic required for sustainability. Drawing from my fieldwork, I suggest that human flourishing must additionally incubate resistance to consumerism.

Federal statute, 16 U.S.C. § 3113, defines subsistence as “the customary and traditional uses by rural Alaska residents of wild, renewable resources.” Alaska Natives, however, view subsistence as the heart of their lifeway, which is creative and intergenerational. I conducted twenty-seven narrative interviews with subsistence practitioners in the remote community of Cordova in southcentral Alaska; the qualitative analysis of these interviews yielded an unexpected category of “resistance.” Resistance is evidenced by the interviewees’ connection to their immediate geography, self-reliance and self-motivation, and opposition to the values that they ascribe to mainstream society.

Subsistence practitioners—although a non-dominant and ostensibly peripheral group—have agency as well as dignity and voice. Their lives exemplify the richness of human flourishing and make manifest the bounty of the landscape. I identify and describe three characteristics of resistance within an expanded theoretical context: intentionality, resilience, and sustainability. Only by reconceptualizing progressive property can we protect living and non-living natural resources and safeguard traditional cultural places like the Copper River Basin.

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