- Nature needs an equivalent to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a new op-ed argues.
- The ‘rights of nature’ is an allied approach, but nature needs something with more and broader teeth, that can elicit a moral and political consensus on the need for nature conservation.
- This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay.
Attending the UN climate (COP28) and biodiversity (COP16) conferences during the past two years, it strikes this observer that the UN specialist environmental agreements on climate, biodiversity, pollution, hazardous waste, desertification, and so forth, all tacitly assume a global political context other than the one we are in.
This political context is something we as a human community urgently need to build, not only for the sake of seeing such agreements succeed, but even more, for moving toward a day when they are no longer necessary.
The currently missing political context goes well beyond the euphemistic “lack of political will” sometimes fleetingly referenced – as if with sufficient will, these specialist agreements alone would suffice to preserve the planet, without requiring any further political or economic change. In fact, it is not a lack of political will that is the problem, but rather an inordinate amount of very real political and cultural will operating against these agreements’ success, against making the environmental expert’s view of the world successful in overtaking the power broker’s view.
On the power-broker’s side, these agreements seem irrational; they buck the dominant trends afoot, not only in material terms, but in terms of ideas and zeitgeist. It is rational by major companies’ standards to do away with even their fleeting lip service to ESG, as many now are, because the entire notion of ESG is at odds with the mainstream, oil-based economy, which operates in a frame entirely devoid of any goals or values except providing goods and services that people buy and use (and buy and use them we do, at scale), and making a profit while doing so. The environmental experts and the major companies of the world (and national governments to a great extent) are still operating within entirely different conceptual schemes, as the philosophers might say. What makes sense to one, literally does not compute for the other.
Seen against this backdrop, the long and painstaking delegate discussions on the various texts and motions of the UN-convened multilateral environmental agreements evoke the cart being put before the proverbial horse – the horse here being the power-brokers who can really enforce national-level implementation. Again, the horse is right now not even present on the same road, much less even close to being hooked to the cart of eco-agreements. The horse is fully occupied pulling the overloaded wagon of business-as-usual (BAU) up a completely different hill, and it is not rational to expect the horse to cut itself in half and pull two carts in two different directions.
Though this is not a popular sentiment in the ‘expert-o-sphere,’ it seems that the only way forward is to persuade the horse to slow down (and eventually unhook itself from the BAU wagon altogether) using values-based, political arguments, not scientific facts or eco-expert opinions. The BAU wagon is not stopped by facts, not even facts which suggest that eventually, the road it is on leads to a cliff. The BAU wagon figures that if and when the cliff actually does loom very blatantly and force the stop, then this is when it will stop. And not a moment before.
While many rail against BAU about this, it may be partly due to our evolutionary tendency: pushing right up against limits before being forced to adapt, like many other species. We don’t, in the modern West at least, have a good track record of scaling back on resource use before we are forced to, and merely due to facts-based foresight. The only things that can sway leaders and nations to undertake rapid systems change of any kind are ideas, values shifts and political movements – not facts. Values, beliefs, and politics do have a long historical record of moving whole groups, tribes, societies and nations to change their behaviors and their perspectives relatively quickly, whether for good or for ill (including from the perspective of harms to nature). New ideas and new values are how and why we change. They seem like the only things that can slow the wagon of BAU down now, short of flat-out environmental catastrophe.
The UN has an important role to play in accomplishing environmental preservation, but it needs to fire up its old political core spirit. Some member country needs to put forward an unflinchingly political and ethical new universal declaration on nature. Some bloc of countries needs to make the General Assembly take up such a declaration and make every leader vote up or down on it, on behalf of their people, and then the UN’s formidably large workforce with its global presence needs to carry the message (and the list of the up and down votes) to the public so that the political and ethical debate can continue.
BAU in the end cannot exist without serving a need for people. If the people develop a political will to change what they will accept, things can change, and rapidly. The BAU inertia does not favor true political discussion for this very reason. BAU actors want to continue to stovepipe and export to experts, or minimize environmental issues as though they were marginalize-able. The global community can begin to refuse at least this laziness through forcing a debate on the ethical merits of preserving nature, and the political values associated with it as a potential course of action.
In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was at its heart a moral position paper. Whether countries passed or rejected it constituted a political statement, a statement about who they were as nations. It was not even binding. But it was an example of what can happen in a global forum – and it both embodied and further catalyzed an important shift in global culture, one which truly meant something to the public then, and still does to this day, over 75 years later.
Nature needs its equivalent – and not exactly a “rights of nature” approach, per se – but a declaration in the same spirit of eliciting a moral and political consensus, or at the very least defining the opposing sides on a moral and political question. The Rio Conference in 1992, the Paris Agreement of 2015, the pablum restatements of the ‘vital importance of nature’ which pepper all specifically environmental documents and agreements and research papers – these are all different because they occur under the heading of environmental issues and not mainstream ones.
The mainstream public in most countries does not follow environmental research or specialist conferences, and thus most political mainstreams do not even seriously discuss it, and certainly not the nature question for its own sake, as a values issue – though it is difficult for the environmental expert community to remember this, since they remain always immersed and encased in their own [worthy but, relatively speaking, minuscule] tribe.
The vast majority of the mainstream public in the West does not question BAU, seeing it as just the way things are, with the (perhaps increasingly dizzying and daunting) array of hoops they must jump through on any given day to survive and find food and shelter for themselves and their families.
But this does not mean the mainstream does not care about or value nature for its own sake. The UN needs a 21st century resolution in the General Assembly that gives an unflinching statement of both the contemporary plight of the natural world due to human impacts, and our moral stance in favor of ameliorating this plight and having nature thrive again. The moral stance can then become political intention. A universal declaration on nature must state that nature is of more inherent value to us than BAU, and that politically we want to unwind BAU so that where we must choose between the two, we can, as we must, choose nature. It needs to be a declaration which holds up the ethical core of the issue, and asks the question of do we, in fact, care about preserving the environment, will we make it a political priority, and do we acknowledge that this entails limits on our enterprise as a species?
These are the types of general, universal questions which the public can follow and engage with, and which might excite them politically. With a good messaging and publicity campaign, the UN could help motivate a great deal of interest in such a declaration.
The question of ‘Do we care?’ can no longer be avoided. If a universal declaration can force each government to answer at the central, chief executive level, yes or no, this will do more to either move environmental preservation forward, or else at the very least reveal in full detail the true dimensions of the ruts keeping us all on the wagon of BAU moving together toward the cliff, than all the specialist eco-agreements under the sun can.
Katherine Snow is a former U.S. national security professional and is now a PhD researcher on the philosophy of nature and science.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Various new legal avenues like the rights of nature and personhood can work for conservation, listen here:
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