In a June 2015 “letter to humanity about the Environment”, Pope Francis asks us to redefine our relationship with the world in “the language of fraternity and beauty”. For him, “the world” includes fellow humans and non-human living species. This call of unity between humanity and nature is an attempt to heal the wounds Western modernity has caused by equating civilisation with the goals of conquering wild nature or the “frontier”. Others across the world too internalised this instinct, leading to the globalisation of a ‘civilisational’ ethos founded on violence—against nature and fellow human beings.
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The principle of ontological unity, attributed to some strands of Hinduism and many indigenous cultures, rejects such machoistic notions of progress and civilisation. Here, the unity of the human and non-human world is a given—and not in need of fresh assertions. Much of Hindu philosophy, though, is alive only in the scriptures and is delegitimised entirely by the violence of caste oppressions. It’s the lives and lifeworlds of the indigenous peoples, including many in India, that still bear a resemblance to that ethos—being intricately tethered to their natural environments. These indigenous philosophies about the interconnectedness of humanity and nature have inspired calls for pursuing “inter-species justice” by enacting new and legally enforceable “rights” for nature and non-human species—take the 2019 perspective piece A Rights Revolution for Nature, published in Science, as a recent instance.
Protecting natural forests, wildlife and biodiversity is vital for both instrumental and intrinsic reasons—it is vital to a thriving planet and the future of humanity. No one serious about those objectives would question the need for nature conservation. But a question worth pondering over is whether making species legal entities that enjoy rights would alleviate the root causes of environmental and species destruction. The advocates of inter-species rights present their argument as an exemplar of a non-anthropocentric perspective—one that rises above the parochialism of a human-centred worldview. But the calls for the ‘rights of nature’ suffer from various problems. One is what philosophers would call a ‘category mistake’—the fallacy of assigning to something a quality that can logically be assigned only to things of another category. The very notion of ‘rights’ is an anthropocentric way of thinking—even if it be about nature. That aside, even if ‘rights of nature’ were to become a universal law, effective enforcement of such rights would remain a challenge.
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Take the ‘Rights of Mother Earth’, a radical law that Bolivia’s Plurinational Assembly passed in December 2010, drawing on the indigenous philosophy of Panchamama. In 2011, the very next year, Bolivia began constructing a highway across the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS). This project violated both the ecology and the rights of indigenous peoples, who protested in large numbers, only to be suppressed violently. The violations have continued apace, especially after the enactment of Supreme Decree 2366 in May 2015, which legalises exploratory drilling of oil and gas in indigenous territories that are also home to over 60 of Bolivia’s protected areas and 22 national parks. The Bolivian government justifies these actions, violative of its own 2010 law, in the name of ‘national development’.
This raises a fundamental question—should we be naïve enough to believe we can enforce the ‘rights of nature’, even as we struggle to enforce fundamental human rights to any degree of satisfaction? In any case, it would be a mistake to view the ‘rights of nature’ apart from, let alone in contravention to, those enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The ongoing debates on human rights to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment recognise the interdependence of human rights and environmental protection. Specifically these words: “…the exercise of human rights, including rights to freedom of expression and association, to education and information, and to participation and effective remedies, is vital to the protection of the environment.” David Boyd, the present UN Special Rapporteur on environmental human rights, is walking the talk. He is joining as a friend of the court in a legal battle that South Africa’s environmental groups are pursuing against the government over the constitutional right to clean air.
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Unfortunately, some of the largest nature conservation NGOs have long been accused of supporting governments that use conservation projects to throw people off their traditional lands. The research we have done at the University of Connecticut shows that, all else equal, the poorest people in some of the poorest countries bear an extraordinarily large share of the costs of conservation. Global conservation preys on economic inequality and authoritarian political systems for an ever-expanding neocolonial empire of conservation. Tens of millions of people have been dispossessed and displaced from their lands because of the establishment of national parks and other wilderness areas. Germany froze financial support to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) following an investigation by online portal Buzzfeed that showed it “funds, equips, and works directly with forces that have tortured, raped and killed people.” In October 2020, the US government stopped over $12 million of funding to WWF, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and other conservation NGOs after a bipartisan investigation into whether conservation funds were used to support anti-poaching activities leading to human rights abuses in Africa. The global evidence on the excesses of nature conservation has not prevented advocacy for even more radical measures.
Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson advocates setting aside “half the planet in reserve, or more” exclusively for nature conservation. Faced with criticism, Wilson and his supporters resort to simplistic, patronising tropes: offering indigenous people as “often the best protectors” of nature, while hastening to add that “the half-Earth goal would not simply mean banning people from half of the planet’s land area, but keeping these areas undeveloped.” Each of these ideas hews to the presumptuous, demeaning imagery of noble savages, the ‘wild’ or ‘primitive’ human ‘uncorrupted’ by modern civilisation. As if on cue, right after those Wilson quotes, the Guardian report placed a photo of Huaorani women and children sitting in the forest in Bameno Community Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park—unclothed, in their way, a fact that only reinforces stereotypes here for the typical reader.
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To reiterate, good intentions cannot delink ‘rights of nature’ from how these ideas are used in practice. There is plenty of indication—from the UN targets of 30 by 30 (that is, 30 per cent of global land to be set aside as protected areas by 2030) to wealthy foundations willing to invest in Half the Planet proposal—that the advocacy of rights of nature is likely to entail a massive expansion of the network of 21st century enclosures. Such reserves are placed under legal and administrative arrangements that criminalise local subsistence use of natural resources, such as fisheries, foraging for medicinal herbs, tending of household animals and subsistence farming, while still allowing prospecting and extraction of fossil fuels and other minerals. These processes are comparable to the creation of the 18th century English enclosures in which village commons were privatised to support commercial wool production.
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Wilson’s privileged status—as a White male scientist at Harvard—cannot be discounted as a factor in his larger-than-life persona and influence. It is also not a coincidence that Wilson once echoed the Nazi doctrines on eugenics and suggested that “some human beings are genetically superior to others”. It’s Wilson’s fellow global elite who are responsible for the largest shares of environmental degradation and climate crisis. Yet, to paraphrase Pope Francis, with an attitude of “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs,” these biologists are presumptuous enough to dictate the fate of half the planet. Locking nature away in safe boxes of wilderness will not prevent us from the sixth mass extinction or a climate crisis, as evident from the wildfires in the Amazon, Australia, or the American West. Regeneration of the earth’s ecosystem is vital to the multiple goals of human well-being and planetary integrity. But creating elite-ordained pockets of wilderness or conferring a set of utopian ‘rights’ to nature will not help if we continue business as usual elsewhere. Instead, we need to harness the power of human-nature solidarities, as exemplified by indigenous justice movements. We need to build new visions of regenerative environmentalism that starts with stopping profligate consumption. Genuine respect for nature demands that we make nature part of who we are and establish bonds of love and affection that generations of Sufis have taught us so beautifully.
(Kashwan is the author of Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico, OUP, 2017. Some of the arguments here draw on his forthcoming book Decolonizing Environmentalism, co-authored with Aseem Hasnain, and to be published by OR Books and Warscapes. Views are personal.)
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Prakash Kashwan is associate professor, Department of Political Science, and co-director, Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs.
