Human Rights and Environmental Protection

A large number of people argue that traditional approaches to human rights can have a negative impact in the field of environmental protection. Human Rights at its core is a field concerned with humans but also with the rights that flow from being human. As it happens, the subject of human rights is so focused on the singular human that it has had a great deal of trouble even with the fact of there being more than one human around. The origins of the subject of Human Rights in its modern form lie in the work of Thomas Hobbes, who envision the individual as an autonomous entity fighting to survive in a hostile state of nature is regarded as a core of the way this field is constructed today. In the past, human rights activists secured support for marginalized people to get over the problem of individual self-absorption. However, they did so by contrasting their plight with that of animals, meaning that you should not treat people like animals. This suggests that if people were animals it would be absolutely fine to exploit, beat and treat them as one desired. This presupposes that the subject of Human Rights has trouble with the idea of grasping and extending rights to nonhuman and even non-sentient living things capable of imposing moral demands.

It seems important to state that the lack of interest in the nonhuman world is evident in international human rights law. The human-rights-based attitude has thereby equipped governments with a reason to act unconcerned about environmental protection. Under these circumstances, the need to bring the environmental and human rights movements together have to be rendered both urgent and vital.

References:

Gearty, C., 2010. Do human rights help or hinder environmental protection?. Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, 1(1), pp.7-22.