[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about three arbitrarily-selected issues related to the rights of nature. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–The destruction of nature is the destruction of ourselves. (Louis Casado)
Three subthemes (some unsystematic tidbits)
Climate
–As Greta Thunberg once put it: “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling”.
1. It is clear that having a specific limit, rather than fighting to stop every fraction of a degree in temperature rise, has actually been counterproductive. There is a perennial problem with targets, and that is that they are always still reachable –until they are not. In this way, they can be used to justify inertia right up until it is too late. And this is exactly how fossil-fuel corporations, world leaders and others have used the 1.5C target, i.e., as a get-out-of-jail card to justify inaction on emissions. Continuing to present this temperature threshold as doable provides a fig leaf for business as usual. Take it away, and this dangerous jiggery-pokery is exposed for all to see.
2. Only if the Conference of the Parties (COP) acknowledges that 1.5C is now lost, and that dangerous, all-pervasive climate breakdown is unavoidable, will corporations and governments no longer have anywhere to hide, and no safety net that they can use as an excuse to do little or nothing. (Bill Mcguire)
3. Pledges made by duty bearers, including funding commitments, are not meaningless yet are not meaningful as results either. Let us not lose our focus and get distracted by comforting words. Biodiversity loss and climate crisis goals must be taken together, and it is action with results that must be demanded. As usual, any good news remains suspect and highly compromised until proven. (David Zakus)
Energy
4. There are a number of issues to which human rights (HR) law has paid inadequate attention. I will mention one here: Energy. While energy for heating and food has been addressed repeatedly by international HR bodies in the context of the right to adequate housing, there has as yet been no recognition of a free-standing right to energy. Given the recognized impact of (the lack of) access to energy on a range of different HR, it was strongly argued before the current crisis whether there ought to be a solo HR to energy linked to other rights such as the right to housing or to the right to health. However, the linkage between energy and HR has been thrown into sharp dispute by the current crisis as pertains to both individuals and collective rights.
Has the time come to make an argument for a universal human right to energy? (Aiofe Nolan)
5. If so, five questions here:
- What should this right look like?
- Should it be a right to energy for specific, limited life-sustaining activities (for instance, cooking, home-heating or cleaning) or should it be conceptualized more broadly?
- How may its components –adequacy, availability, access (including affordability), sustainability, appropriateness, acceptability, and quality– be defined?
- What obligations (progressive, immediate, core, or otherwise) should it impose? and, crucially,
- How may the recognition and implementation of that standard impact on, and be balanced against other HR, on both the here and now and on future generations?
6. These questions (and their implicit recognition that the right to energy requires careful definition if it is not to undermine other rights) cannot be ignored given the damage done by the established global energy system in relation to ecosystems, as well as the fact that it continues to pose the greatest environmental health hazards to those who have benefited the least from increased energy production.*(A. Nolan)
*: Swapping oil for electricity is just another business opportunity. The question is who controls the production. [The European Union has decided that, after all, nuclear energy has its advantages –among them that of generating profit…] (L. Casado)
Does Nature have Rights? Why not? (Colin Tudge)
7. The nay-sayers to these questions fall into three main categories:
- First, there are those who say that to grant nature rights is not rational. Morality, in the end, is non-rational, it is said. The idea that Nature has rights is indeed in large measure non-rational. But it is certainly not irrational, meaning mad. Indeed, if we aspire to live in a harmonious world then the idea is entirely rational. It is certainly irrational to reject what is non-rational out of hand.
- Second: Some theologians argue that the idea that Nature has rights is somehow blasphemous. This line of thinking implies that man is in a quite different category from the rest of Nature and further suggests that the norms that attach to us (including the idea of HR) need not and indeed should not apply to the rest.
- Third: Many simply declare, peremptorily, that there should be no rights without responsibilities. But does it mean Nature has responsibilities?
8. For the benefit of the hard-heads, we can point out: There are very good practical reasons to declare that Nature has Rights!
Why we should declare that Nature does indeed have Rights
—The concept of Rights helps to prevent abuse and therefore helps to protect.
9. Human beings need to protect the natural world much better than we do, because only Nature can protect us against the extremes of Nature. We should protect wild nature for its own sake. It ought to be self-evident. The feeling that Nature really matters should never be overridden. It must be cultivated.
10. As we look more closely at nature, as indeed Darwin did, we find more and more examples of cooperativeness within species and between species. Overall, Nature is far more cooperative than it is competitive and if it were not so life itself could not have come about. (C. Tudge)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com
Postscript/Marginalia
–John Locke argued that whoever used land most efficiently –which really meant most productively, in material terms– had the most right to make use of it. Since the white-man’s agriculture produced more food per acre than the native farmers using their own kinds of farming, the ‘incomers’ had more claim on it. (C. Tudge) …?