Human Rights and the Environment
Making Global Warming a Matter of Justice
Protecting the environment shouldn't be treated like a noble pipe-dream, but a fundamental human rights concern.
Environmental issues are often brushed off as a matter of taste: some people relish a thriving economy, while others prefer protecting obscure little animals on inconsequential wetlands.
Corporate interest groups would even have people believe it’s irresponsible to sink major international deals—like the fossil-fuel projects the United States has helped fund in more than 40 countries since 1995 (Los Angeles Times, “U.S. Sends Mixed Message on Climate,” August 12, 2007).
Such deals help bolster third-world economies and raise standards of living, the arguments go, and their footprint on the global environment is trivial. (Though one project in Jamangar, India, alone will generate about nine million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually.)
Global Warming Is a Matter of Justice, Not Morality
But environmental decisions are hardly a matter of preference, where one is free to weigh short-term economic benefits against future problems, leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. Environmental concern isn’t even, as Al Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth, “a moral imperative.” After all, moral issues have spawned some of the bloodiest, most unjust wars in the history of mankind.
Maintaining a healthy environment isn’t a quest, but a matter of justice: global warming is a matter of human rights.
The moniker “human rights” goes beyond moral admonitions, carrying a secular ethical weight which crosses political borders and moral ideologies. It raises the issue from something people should worry about, to one they are obligated by justice to do something about.
The Environment as a Human Rights Issue
There are excellent arguments to support treating the environment as a human rights issue. Take Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person,” a principle recognized in virtually every enlightened constitution around the globe.
And yet the World Health Organization has estimated as many as 150,000 people a year may be dying as a result of climate changes since the 1970s. And that number will probably climb.
If the world may be seen as one giant pie, it makes intuitive sense to think everyone has the right to an equal share. Some thinkers happily admit that point, but argue the world was more or less divided equally long ago, with some people making lifestyle choices to work harder and acquire more, while others preferred more leisure time and wound up with less (take, for example, Robert Nozick’s famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia).
Such arguments are often used to imply that current owners have a rightful claim to their property, and the right to decide whether or how they do business with it. But even if society ignores the fact that much of the world’s resources were robbed from the original inhabitants, which makes absolute claims today highly questionable, it still can’t hang new generations out to dry and leave them dependent on the generosity of the present tenants.
Rights and the Principle of Fairness
If society denies an equal respect for the rights of each new generation to life, liberty and personal security (and the healthy environment necessary for those to flourish), then claims that businesses have a right to buy, sell, trade and pollute as they see fit disintegrate.
If the principle of fairness isn't upheld for everyone, there’s no reason to uphold it exclusively for corporations. And if society does admit it needs to respect the rights of each new generation on the planet, then that drastically limits what businesses may fairly do.
Society simply must stop treating the environment as if it were a fantasy ideal which would be nice to protect, and begin ranking it as a prime human rights concern, whose violation shakes the very principles of justice.
