Rethinking Nature’s Rights
In When Nature’s Rights Go Wrong, Professors Mauricio Guim and Michael Livermore offer much needed analytical clarity to a significant, yet still understudied, field: rights of nature. After centuries of adopting a predominantly human-centric perspective, a more biocentric outlook is now coming to the fore.
Much like property rights, nature’s rights award control over clusters of natural resources. However, unlike traditional property rights, in the case of nature’s rights—as the name suggests—the right holders are non-human. What’s more, they tend to attach to a broader and more general natural entity, such as an ecosystem or a class of species, rather than a more crisply defined right-holder.
This carries profound implications for nature’s rights function and ability to achieve their environmental or climate-related goals. Analyzing nature’s rights is therefore especially important at present, as mounting evidence suggests our current legal mechanisms are insufficient to tackle the climate crisis. Continue reading "Rethinking Nature’s Rights"
