Nature Does NOT have Rights

We need to have a clear notion of what a right is and how and why government should be used to define and protect a right. I think the only coherent source of a “right” is a social agreement between people that their interests are better served with a legally enforced understanding that a right exists. Without an understanding that rights rest only with people we can get the preposterous behavior in the United Nations which resulted in the notion that religions have rights.

Frankly we are now in the embarrassing position of having little to say against the draconian blasphemy laws in Islamic countries when European countries also have blasphemy laws on their books. Ireland is a case in point on this. Irish atheists are trying to challenge the law which imposes a fine of up to 25,000 Euros on anyone who is guilty of "publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion...” Michael Nugent, the Chair of Atheist Ireland said, “This new law is both silly and dangerous. It is silly because medieval religious laws have no place in a modern secular republic, where the criminal law should protect people and not ideas. And it is dangerous because it incentives religious outrage, and because Islamic states led by Pakistan are already using the wording of this Irish law to promote new blasphemy laws at UN level.” This quote is from the Guardian. As secularists we cannot object to Islamic governments supporting abusive laws punishing blasphemy if we do not have a clear notion that rights of necessity apply to people only.

A right is a liberty or privilege protected by the force of law. Rights do not exist as transcendental artifacts coming from a supreme being or our over active imaginations. Where does this leave the currently popular notion of nature having rights? I will argue that almost every legitimate right that would be in place from a theory that nature has rights can be derived from ascribing those rights to people.

We need to make it clear that people have a right to very limited pollution of their environment. People should have a right to expect that the vast array of services provided by the wider ecosystem will not collapse because capitalists do not want to pay for the devastation they leave behind in their quest for money. Our children should have a right to live in a world that has not been devastated by the early stages of a great extinction that will massively reduce the number of species in their future world.

I think most importantly we should have a right to have the food supply that is critical for the survival of humanity to remain intact. We should have a right to have the fisheries of the world survive into the future. We should have a right to be able to eat fish without ingesting unacceptable loads of mercury from coal fired power plants. We should have a right to see the Midwest, the bread basket of our nation, not be turned into a scrub desert due to global warming. We should have a right to have our beach-front property not be flooded out by a rising ocean. We should have a right to not see our forests destroyed by a vastly longer fire season caused by anthropogenic global warming.

Obviously by the time we list and enforce the all the rights that people should have we will have protected nature also. That is because our survival and positive well being is tightly linked to the preservation of the wider natural ecosystem within which we have evolved as a species.

Nature has Rights

This Earth Day you can read the proposed Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth at:

http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/db_article.php?article_id=238

This declaration was adopted by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, in Bolivia on April 22, 2010.

Essentially the draft United Nations treaty gives "Mother Earth" the same rights as humans. Bolivia proposed this at the UN having passed a "Law of the Rights of Mother Earth", which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks about Bolivia's natural resources in reverent terms ("blessings") while granting the concept of "Earth" or perhaps Nature a series of specific rights analogous to people such as include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution. The law established a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with Representation. That is, there is a Nature ombudsman whose job is to hear "nature's complaints" as voiced by activist, activist groups, and state organizations.

Pablo Salon, Bolivia's ambassador to the UN, describe it this way to Postmedia News.

"If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance? But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance."

Closer to us Canadian activist Maude Barlow who is former Senior Advisor on Water to the President of the UN General Assembly and chairperson of the Council of Canadians. She is a leading contributor to The Rights of Nature and among global environmentalists backing the UN drive with a book (The Rights of Nature) the group will launch in New York during the UN debate o whether Nature Has Rights. Here is how she makes the argument:

"The case for acknowledging the Rights of Nature cannot be understated." Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now as we begin to understand the urgent need to protect the Earth and its ecosystems from which all life comes. The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth is a crucial link in this process and will one day stand as the companion to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as one of the guiding covenants of our time. "

Of the campaign Barlow said:

"It's going to have huge resonance around the world," . "It's going to start first with these southern countries trying to protect their land and their people from exploitation, but I think it will be grabbed onto by communities in our countries, for example, fighting the tar sands in Alberta."

You can see an interview with Barlow and others talking about this topic on this at http://blip.tv/file/5047387