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Jonathan Lash, President, World Resources Institute
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By Jonathan Lash
Environmental destruction often translates into human misery, and is frequently accompanied by abuse of the most basic human rights. The victims are usually poor – those least able to defend their interests, least likely to have or assert property rights, and least likely to have access to the resources needed to protect themselves.
Recall Chico Mendes – the Brazilian rubber tapper from Xaipuri in the Amazon – who was murdered by ranchers for protesting their destruction of the forest his community lived in and from. Or Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed in Nigeria for protesting oil pollution and corruption. And there is Yosepha Aloman, the elder of the Amungme people in Irian Jaya, Indonesia. She was tortured and imprisoned in a cell filled with feces after she protested the destruction caused by Freeport McMoRan’s Grasberg mine.
Environmental destruction injures people’s lives and livelihoods by eliminating their source of sustenance and income, wrecking their homes, or threatening their health. Often these victims also face corrupt leaders, illegal corporate actions, and violent repression of legitimate protest.
So if environmental and human rights abuses are often linked, can ensuring individual rights work as an effective antidote to environmental destruction? Will the environment gain from increasing individual access to information, opportunities to participate, and guaranteeing the right of judicial redress?
Perhaps the place to start in talking about human rights and the environment is the Haida Gwaii – a remarkable archipelago 200 kilometers off the coast of British Columbia. It is a place rich with life, shrouded by towering cedar trees, and pummeled by stormy weather.
The southern third of the archipelago is a park accessible only by water where my wife and I spent 10 days kayaking last summer. It is the only park in the world administered by descendants of its original aboriginal inhabitants. Their history is much like that of other North American native people: victims of disease, domination, and relocation, much of their land was stripped of trees.
The park was created a decade ago when remnants of the Haida people said “no more!” And with the backing of environmentalists, won creation of the park. Was this an issue of human rights? The environment? Of course it was both.
The vindication of human rights deserve more attention than they ordinarily get from environmentalists. Democratic participation and individual rights offer a great lever for change. They are a weapon against corruption and a catalyst to stir action by governments immobilized by complex global problems.
Just look at community right-to-know laws. Levels of industrial pollution in Canada, the United States, Germany, Indonesia, and a number of other countries dropped dramatically after polluters were required to publicize their emissions. In the United States, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires government actions to go through a process of environmental assessment and public discussion, has proved to be a killing ground for really bad ideas.
Principle 10, one of the pledges governments signed at Rio in 1992, was a commitment to provide people with information about the environmental decisions affecting them, access to the decision-making process, and a means of seeking redress if those rights are denied. Principle 10 has not been widely implemented. But last year in Johannesburg a coalition led by the World Resources Institute won commitments from many governments because it has the potential, as one senior Latin American official said, “to change everything.”
Access to information is a potentially powerful engine to strengthen the rights of the excluded. And strengthening those rights can be a powerful engine for a more sustainable and secure world.
But there is a problem with the satisfying symmetry of this view that if fewer rights mean more destruction, then more rights must mean less destruction. Not every logger, or miner, or rancher has managed nature’s gifts sustainably.
Indeed, history of environmental regulation is one of applying coercive measures to restrict individual freedom to harm the environment. While human-rights advocates defend the individual against the tyranny of the majority, environmentalists fight for the common good against narrow individual interests.
There will always be tensions between the rights of individuals and the responsibility of stewardship. But as we face problems that are global, intergenerational, and irreversible, we need to confront those tensions and build a human security alliance that protects both rights and the environment.
Climate change is the quintessential global environmental challenge: emissions from one area of the globe affect the climate everywhere, although not equally. Most emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases that cause global warming come from industrialized countries. Yet the worst of the fallout is expected in poor countries with minimal greenhouse-gas emissions, like Bangladesh.
This raises some interesting questions about justice and rights. When U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases are the largest contribution to the sea-level rise that will submerge the Pacific island of Vanuatu, for example, is that a right or an abuse of a right? When one generation makes choices – or fails to make choices – that create irreversible environmental changes that restrict our children’s options, what principle can we articulate for our allocation of rights between current and future generations? (WRI Features, 803 words)
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