Around the world, campaigners are successfully arguing that mountains, trees and rivers should have legal rights.
By Nicola Cutcher for the New Humanist (26th October 2020)
[….] “In 2017, the government of New Zealand passed legislation which recognised the Maori’s Whanganui river as a legal person. The Maori see all forms of nature as their kin. This is encapsulated in their saying: ‘I am the river and the river is me.’ The new legislation recognises the Maori’s holistic concept of the river as Te Awa Tupua (river of sacred power), defining it as ‘an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the Whanganui river and all of its physical and metaphysical elements.’ Two individuals will serve as the river’s official guardians, one chosen by the Maori and one by the government, and they will speak on behalf of Te Awa Tupua.
The river’s newfound legal status prompts the question of where it begins and ends. For the Maori, it begins in the mists swirling above the mountains and valleys. In David Freid’s beautiful short documentary The River Is Me, there is a remarkable exchange between the director and the government minister who negotiated the treaty, Christopher Finlayson, who says: ‘The fact of the matter is you can’t divide a river up into the bed, the water column, and the air above the river – I think you can get hung up on these western concepts of ownership.’
Freid posits that since the river’s water comes from the rain and the rain falls through farmland and city streets, now that the river is indivisible, perhaps everything that water touches along the way might eventually gain the same personhood. ‘I suppose that’s right,’ Finlayson says, ‘in so far as the water is part of this indivisible entity that will flow in and flow out.’
So then the larger idea, Freid suggests, is that all of nature in some way or another gets spoken for. Finlayson looks unabashed. ‘When you think about it, why not?’ It’s a thought that hangs heavy in the air.
Other victories for the rights of nature have sprung up all over the world. In 2019, Bangladesh became the first country to grant all of its rivers the same status as humans, and decreed that the National River Conservation Commission will speak for the rivers. Ecuador and Bolivia have enshrined the rights of nature in their constitutions. Communities across the US, starting in Pennsylvania, have also put in place rights for nature at a local level by passing local ordinances (akin to British bylaws). David R. Boyd documents many of these moments in his book The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World [ECW Press, 2018].” [....]
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While I understand the motivation and (metaphysical and/or moral and legal) reasons for wanting to grant rights to “natural” objects or ecological processes (or webs) or the natural world, the language of legal rights should, I think, be distinguished from the various kinds of rights we accord human beings as well as (increasingly) those nonhuman animals (including our pets, apes, chimpanzees, dolphins, and perhaps a few other animal families, like corvidae!) we might or should designate as “legal persons,” in other words, those animals we accord aspects, properties, or features of personhood so as to grant them some basic legal rights. We might also consider a corresponding roster of duties and obligations as inextricably tied to such rights. In other words, we need an adjective that rules out confusion and conflation with regard to these myriad legal rights in the human and natural worlds. Although I’m not sure which one is most appropriate, morally, legally, and rhetorically, a handful of concepts come to mind: trustee, beneficiary, conservator, stewardship, or rights of respect or care, or “natural regard” rights. I need to think more about this, but I welcome your suggestions, preferences, comments.
An early argument worth re-visiting along these lines is Paul W. Taylor’s Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1986), in particular his chapter, “Do Animals and Plants Have Rights?” Taylor believes an environmental ethics can suffice without invoking a notion of “moral rights.” In his words,
“The concepts of the good of a living thing, of the inherent worth of a living thing, of the attitude for nature, and the traditional idea of moral principles as validly binding upon all moral agents [‘autonomous’ persons], are fully adequate. To add the notion of moral rights to this conceptual structure is not to add anything ethically significant. And since people will naturally tend to think of moral rights according to the paradigm provided by rights of person, confusion is like to be engendered by the use of the language of [moral] rights in the domain of environmental ethics.”
The confusion Taylor refers to here is analogous if not identical to the sort of confusion I believe can occur with the granting of legal rights to all animals, plants, trees, rivers, and so forth. Although that does not prevent me from agreeing with Taylor:
“As long as we consider animals and plants to be entities that have a good of their own which can be furthered or damaged by the actions of human agents, it is logically conceivable for them to have the legal status of bearer-of-rights in a given society. Thus we can speak meaningfully of protecting their good by laws that entitle them to be treated in certain ways. Just as is the case with humans, their life and well-being can be made secure by laws that confer on them certain rights. [….] In such a system the laws give public recognition to animals and plants as having legitimate claims against humans. The fact that those who have the claims cannot assert them, insist on them, or even understand them does not take away their legitimacy.”
Thus while in the human world moral rights have been historically, conceptually, and legally related in one way or another to legal rights, this linkage does not exist in the case of the natural world, therefore it suffices to have a strong (or deeply green or ecologically sound) environmental ethics [one not wedded to any particular metaphysical worldview, even if a few metaphysical presuppositions are, strictly speaking, unavoidable] alongside—with proper adjectival qualification—legal rights for animals, plants, and other parts or processes of the natural world.
Relevant bibliographies
- North American Indians: History, Culture, Politics, and Law
- Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
- Ecological and Environmental Politics, Philosophies, and Worldviews
- Human Nature and Personal Identity
Recent posts of related interest
- Indigenous Peoples
- Teaching children about animals: “inconsistency” and “confusion mixed with hypocrisy”
- Possible logical constraints on principles in animal ethics that entail vegetarianism or veganism
- An imminent global environmental apocalypse
- Thomas Nagel’s review of Christine Korsgaard’s argument on the nature of our moral obligations to nonhuman animals
- Toward Red-Green Socialism: Recommended Reading
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