Culture & Ethics
Good Grief, Now It’s "River Rights"
Anti-human exceptionalism is becoming epidemic. Now it’s “river rights.”
An Indian environmental activist has won an award for improving water systems in his home country. Good for him. But now, Rejendra Singh wants to engage the UN to adopt very radical — and anti-human — policies. From the story in The Guardian:
In 2017, Singh will visit the office of the United Nations high commissioner for human rights in Geneva to push for the recognition of the right to river water and access to nature. The recently recognised human right to water and sanitation is dependent on a clean environment and flowing river, Singh said.
People have long struggled over water rights, and to be sure, there need to be laws protecting access and obliging users to use proper environmental practices. But then Singh goes off the rails:
“On paper, you have declared water is a human right. But water as a human right is only possible after river rights and nature rights. Without the clean flow of the river you can’t ensure the human right,” he said.
That is utter drivel. And paradoxical. If rivers have rights, they are co-equal to those of the humans who want to benefit from the water — and under nature rights laws, anyone can sue to protect the rights of nature and its constituent elements. That means even the most benign projects could be delayed with threats of lawsuits or subject to green-mail by marauding environmental lawyers.
In such a system, the “rights” of the river could prevail over the putative human rights to water and sanitation, that Singh also espouses.
We can — and do — enact laws and treaties that obligate us to treat the environment properly without granting “rights” to rivers, or nature, or animals. In fact, we have done so for many years, and quite successfully.
Take Yellowstone. The park is doing very well, thank you very much. And — sanely — Old Faithful geyser hasn’t been declared a “person” with rights.
Those who are rolling their eyes, shouldn’t. New Zealand has already declared a river to be a “person” with legal granted rights, and Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, has endorsed “nature rights.”
Image: Sammamish River at Redmond, WA, by Tradnor at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
