Olly Zanetti: Environmental Rights
Should the concept of rights be extended from humans to the environment?
More like this...
For 11 days this December, Copenhagen's population will swell by 20,000 as delegates for the COP15 United Nations Climate Chnage Conference descend on the city.
Hot on their heels will come an entourage of many thousands more: journalists, campaigners, lobbyists and the like. In under a fortnight, the framework by which humanity will address climate change for the next forty years will be thrashed out.
Fractious debate will see per person emissions caps pitted against carbon intensity (the amount of carbon emitted per unit of economic value). Free access to green technology for developing countries will be weighed against the maintenance of existing intellectual property regulations. There will also be discussions over relative merits of offsetting, forests acting as carbon sinks and carbon capture and storage. Enshrining environmental preservation into law will not be an easy task, and arguments will rage.
Across the world, we have more rules and regulations governing our approach to the environment than at any time in history. And yet, our environment is in worse shape than ever. With that as a backdrop, there's little reason to expect the Copenhagen talks to achieve any more than a cobbled together patch which, at best, might just prevent the worst of climate change's ravages. Many would argue that this is simply a function of the near impossibility of getting so many different standpoints and different vested interests to agree on anything. It's just human nature.
But perhaps there's more to it. Sure, getting agreement on such a massive issue is never going to be easy. But what's being discussed at COP15 are not philosophical arguments, they're legal ones and arguably the legal structures through which the environment is governed are not fit for purpose. All too often, environmental regulations are articulated through property law. Generally, if you own a piece of land, you can do what you like to it. If your bad environmental management damages someone else's land, it's only based on some calculation of financial loss that they are able to seek recompense. The ocean and atmosphere are in an even more complex position: owned by no one, they are abused by everyone, the so-called tragedy of the commons. We need better legal tools with which to picture the environment.
Extending the concept of 'rights' from humans to the environment might be the way to do it. Rather than seeing areas of land, species or even individual plants or animals as commodities to be owned or exchanged, a rights based agenda would see them as rights bearing entities. Just as we have a charter for human rights, so the UN would manage a charter which outlined the rights of the environment. It would be a revolution, just as the civil rights, women's suffrage and campaigns for the rights of children have been.
Of course, an environmental rights agenda wouldn't see the environment given identical rights as people. However, it would turn the way the law deals with the environment on its head. Rather than specific legislation prohibiting specific actions (such as emitting certain gasses in certain places or the destruction of particular ecosystems as we have now), it would enshrine into law the notion that the environment has a right not to be damaged. This would force environmental protection to become the centre of all large scale decision-making and would offer governments and environmental protection organisations firm grounds to sue if rules are flouted.
Unconventional it may be but unrealistic it isn't. Having made their name helping small communities in the United States incorporate environmental rights into local legislation, US based Environmental Legal Defence Fund recently helped write the environmental rights framework which is now central to the Ecuadorian constitution. UK based barrister Polly Higgins is also working on similar issues which she recently presented to UN representatives. It's a concept that could soon be a feature of statute books across the world, or even written into international law.
Rather than putting sticking plasters over the wounds of our collective failure to look after our environment, as will likely happen in Copenhagen, we need something radical. A rights based framework is the best chance we've got of pushing good environmental decision making to the heart of all agendas.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
Environmental Rights (text) by Olly Zanetti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments (2)
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.