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UN Document Would Give ‘Mother Earth’ Same Rights As Humans

This is for all the folks out there — you know who you are — who over the years have told me that I caricaturize environmentalism and environmentalists; that I present the environmental position “unfairly,” as “too extreme” when I call it what it actually is: namely, neo-Marxism at its blackest, a quasi-secular religion that hates human beings and worships at the shrine of death — e.g.: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself” (Al Gore, Club of Rome executive member).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from David Brower, Executive Director of the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

And so on.

But, Ray, this is just the extremist fringe; these folks do not represent the true spirit of the environmental movement, as a reader of this website once told me.

Uh-huh. I suggest you keep telling yourself that so that you don’t have to confront the totality of the philosophy you’ve accepted.

And now there’s this:

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans:

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that 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.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

“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?” Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. “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.”

The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.

Read the full article here.

This, what you just read above, is merely the logical elaboration of the mainstream environmental philosophy, and, among many, many other things, it demonstrates a profound and fatal misunderstanding of the concept of rights, which by definition are compossible.

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Do Animals Possess Rights?

A reader writes:

Dear Ray: I recently read a synopsis of a book about the question of animal rights, and I’m curious to know your take. Do animals possess rights? If so, where do these rights reside?

Thanks,

Pig Bodine

Dear Pig Bodine: Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights, as Herbert Spencer said, are “politico-ethical precepts” that define and delimit human freedom in large groups.

This last thing is emphasized because rights would not be necessary if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society. Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice, which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions. One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission? Answering that question is where you’ll first begin to glimpse the true nature of rights. Indeed, rights are not only not invented: they are an outgrowth of a crucial human need: morality.

Those who would deny rights consistently must, in order to remain consistent, espouse amoralism. Amoralism means no good and no bad. Amoralism does not mean a different standard of good and bad. It means that there is no such thing as good or bad. In the same way, and for the same reason, that you can’t describe a lizard’s behavior as right or wrong because the lizard is amoral, so it is, according to the amoralist, with human beings. Chronic lying, rape, genocide, coprophilia — these, to the amoralist, are all neither bad nor good; they just are. Conversely, self-control, courage, honesty, happiness — these also are neither good nor bad; they just are. To an amoralist, all human actions are exactly equal because from her or his viewpoint morality simply does not exist: morality is an arbitrary human invention without any referent in reality.

Amoralism is the end result of denying the existence of rights.

If humans do not exist by right, humans exist by permission. Whose permission? Whoever holds control. Force therefore becomes the standard.

Rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light, and yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason rights have remained resilient is that in some sense they are self-evident: we each own ourselves.

No freedom and no justice can exist if rights don’t exist — or, in other words, if rights are invented. Indeed, one of the definitions that Oxford gives for rights is the following: “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.” Another definition that Oxford gives is this: “Righteousness, truth, or justice; esp. the cause of truth or justice.”

The very word rights in this context has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, “jus is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.” The Roman juris Ulpian considered a person’s right “that which is due him [or her] given his [or her] status as a human being.” (Cambridge Ancient History: The Primitive Institutions of Rome, H. Stuart Jackson.)

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms — specifically, the freedom to move and act in a certain way. Notice that phrase “freedom to act.” It is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

But what is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made?

To begin with, rights are not primaries. They are precipitated by something. This means that rights derive from something more fundamental. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition: the faculty of choice.

Choice is a prerequisite of morality: there can be no good or bad if there is no freedom to choose a certain course of action. Rights, in turn, are an elaboration upon morality — specifically, morality within a societal framework. That is the link between ethics and politics, which rights supply us with. It is for this reason that rights have been described by Herbert Spencer as “politico-ethical precepts.”

Rights, then, are ultimately grounded in the human capacity of choice — which is to say, free will — because human action is not automatic; and so, therefore, human survival is not automatic but entails choice. As Samual Adams expressed it:

Among the natural rights … are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are necessary for the full exercise of morality, because coercion is the opposite of choice. Some humans may flourish best under coercion, and some humans may even prefer coercion to freedom, but that’s not the point. In any case, it is no argument against rights. The point here is that if you believe humans possess moral agency, you believe, perforce, that rights are inherently part of each (healthy) human: without rights, we would not each have the authority in which to choose moral (or immoral) action. And if you don’t believe that humans possess moral agency, then you don’t believe that humans possess the faculty of choice, in which case you don’t believe that humans can think, but live and act amorally.

Individuation is the crux of rights.

What individuation refers to is the fact that we each have the potential to decide (or not) whether to engage the brain. As the philosophical psychologist Rollo May said:

When we analyze will with all the tools that modern psychology brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or inattention as the seat of will.” (Emphases added). “The effort which goes into the exercise of will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e. the strain of keeping attention focused (Rollo May, Love and Will, 1969).

That is the fundamental act of will — or, if you prefer, the fundamental choice — that determines individuation. It is an act of will which the individual alone can perform, and which the individual alone is responsible for. It is the locus of human sovereignty. (It is also, incidentally, the reason a fetus does not possess rights, but the woman carrying the fetus does: she is individuated; the fetus is not.)

The stuff of rights, then, is the faculty of choice, which gives rise to right and wrong courses of action. But choice comes first. Without choice, there is no morality, and thus there are no rights.

I’m sometimes asked: where do rights reside? Do they dwell as ghosts inside us? The answer is, no, they do not dwell as ghosts inside us. Rights are principles. They reside within the human condition — specifically, the human brain, which operates by means of reason, the activation of which is chosen: it must be willed by each individual. If human action were not chosen but automatic, as it is with the beasts of our animal kingdom, then there would be no such thing as rights, because our actions would be automatic. We would live as those beasts — neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. But human action is chosen. And that is what necessitates the freedom to choose.

The evolution of the human brain is the thing that created rights. How so? Because this evolution created a rational animal called a human being — which is to say, it created the freedom of the will. In slightly more religious terms than I’m comfortable with, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) otherwise put it well:

The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed (“Paradiso,” Canto V, lines 19-24).

Animals do not possess rights because animals are not moral agents — i.e. they are not rational agents. Animals act by genetic predilection or genetic proclivity. The action of animals is not chosen in the full sense of the word. For this reason, the action of animals is amoral.

The grizzly that mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

So it is here the question inevitably arises that if animals do not possess rights, neither, therefore, do babies — or, at least, those babies who only have a few months to live — and nor, for the same reason, do severely brain-damaged people, who are unable to exercise a rational faculty. This flimsy peg (the so-called “argument from marginal cases”) is the postmodern peg that animal rights activists are now hanging their entire case upon.

The first thing to be said about it is that it’s a non sequitur.

The second thing to be said is that severely brain-damaged people do not possess actual rights, for the very reason that we outlined above: they are not able to think and reason. The unalienable right to life, liberty, and property hinges upon the capacity to think, which implies choice, and also upon one’s knowledge. In the same way that healthy children develop the moral faculty gradually, over a span of years, (healthy) children develop rights gradually as they mature into independent beings. Brain-damaged humans who cannot exercise the power of rationality — which is to say, morality — cannot, obviously, exercise their rights, because those rights reside in the very thing these people lack. Thus she (or he) does not possess actual rights. The protection of these people is something granted them for being a part of the human species (and, of course, the chance of medical breakthroughs).

In any case, the attempt to grant animals rights on the basis of so-called marginal human cases does not follow. In fact, it is to negate the very term rights by assuming that marginal cases are the norm and therefore the standard. To grant, for instance, an animal “the right to be left alone” (as it’s often phrased these days) means, among many other things, that there can be no such thing as meat-eating (even under dire conditions), but more than that: there can be no such thing as the domestication of animals, and no such thing as pet ownership: obviously, rights preclude any sort of humans-eating-or-owning-other-humans. If, moreover, it were proven that plants also feel pain and also possess sentience, as many people believe, then plants too possess the “right to be left alone,” and human beings starve because we possess moral agency, while the rest of the animal (and plant) kingdom does not starve, because they are held to no such standards — for the very reason that humans are held to such standards: the rational mind.

(If you think plant rights is a far-fetched idea, don’t read this.)

What this positions amounts to is a stupendous contradiction: animals have the right to be left alone, even though they don’t possess the very thing that necessitates rights: moral agency and the power of reason. And because they don’t possess this, they are incapable of respecting the rights of other animals (including humans); and yet their “rights” must still be respected — by humans alone, because we alone possess the very thing that gives rise to rights. This is a grave and dangerous misunderstanding of the word rights — most specifically of the human need that gives rise to rights, which need is not, incidentally, marginal case at all. If this philosophy were adopted, it would obliterate the idea of rights entirely. To say nothing of the vast legal apparatus that would be required in order to codify, systematize, and institute every animal’s “right to be left alone,” as well as the absurd spectacle of humans presuming to speak for the “wronged” animals, which does have historical precedent, and which, in fact, someone once made a movie about.

There would also, of course, be the not insignificant necessity of human punishment meted out (by humans), for that wronged beast, which beast, however, does not survive by reason but must have justice (i.e.the respect for rights) delivered unto it, even though that beast has absolutely no conception of justice, and never will. This is wrong, all wrong. The distinguishing characteristic of rights is compossibility. Thus there is a very simple, and entirely foolproof, method for determining if something is a right or not: Your rights, my rights, every person’s rights, stop where another’s begin. If you follow that maxim, you’ll never confuse the issue.