The nature rights movement continues to advance into respectability against woefully insufficient resistance. Too many people don’t take the threat seriously because they consider it too crazy to be real.
But the sheer nuttiness of the campaign isn’t the only reason for the movement’s continuing successes. Nature rights activists seem nice. They are not verbal bomb throwers. Rather, they deploy passive language to sell radical environmental and anti-free-market agendas. That seeming mildness sedates some people into wrongly thinking that nature rights is not an acute threat to human liberty and flourishing.
A just published puff-piece interview by The Water Diplomat with Dutch human and nature rights lawyer Jan van de Venis illustrates this tactic. Let’s take a look.
Van de Venis is asked to describe how nature rights is being furthered. His response:
Firstly the Legal Integration pathway, which is securing rights within constitutions and legal frameworks so that judges and lawyers can formally account for nature in their rulings.
“Emancipating” Nature
That sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? But think about the radical disruption to the entire legal system and principle of property rights that would result if, in van de Venis’s words, we initiate a “true emancipation of nature.”
Here’s more.
Secondly, the Representation pathway, namely giving nature a direct voice at the decision-making table within corporate and public structures, such as onboarding nature into boardroom or advisory roles.
In other words, environmental ideologues would be required to participate in all important business and government decision making. That would sure make things more efficient, right?
Then, there is the propaganda:
Thirdly, the Artistic Expression pathway: using art to spark empathy and perspective, inviting us to imagine how non-human life — such as a fish or a hare — experiences human infrastructure projects.
And Can’t You See It?
So human need and thriving will be taken out of the picture. Instead, radical teachers hanging “nature rights” flags in classrooms covered in cuddly animals and scaring children that nature is oppressed:
And fourth, the Systemic Work pathway whereby methods are applied like family constellations to natural areas to map, sense, and understand how interconnected ecosystems respond to change. I think the beauty of the movement lies in this spectrum
I’m not sure what that means, but it sure sounds positive, doesn’t it?
Gentle Indigenous Ways
And then, as nature rights activists always do, van de Venis invokes the gentle ways of “indigenous people:”
Through my subsequent work as a UN Harmony with Nature expert and Head of Legal at the Rights of Nature Foundation in the Netherlands, I fully embraced indigenous worldviews that regard humanity as deeply interconnected with all living things. Today, I champion a fundamental evolution in decision-making that actively considers the interests of non-human life and elevates nature to a recognised bearer of rights. I now often say: Somehow we forgot, when we started making laws, to start with what we all are: life and part of nature.
Not all indigenous people were worthy of emulation. The Aztecs tore up untold square miles of jungle — which I trust van de Venis would think violated the rights of flora and fauna — and engaged in human sacrifice. Besides, adopting indigenous approaches would instill neo-pagan mysticism into public policy and lead to archaic practices incapable of supporting the world’s 8 billion people.
The nature rights lawyer explains how nature — which encompasses everything — would be represented, and it sure wouldn’t focus on human thriving (my emphasis):
Just as children — or future generations — have guardians to advocate for their human rights, ecosystems can be assigned guardians or entities to speak on their behalf — ensuring nature’s core rights to life, health, and flourishing are formally brought to the decision-making table…
Together, these guardians must negotiate what truly benefits the water body. Systems can be tailored so that legal claims are brought either directly by guardians or by groups of citizens, bridging community action with formal governance to ensure non-human life is properly protected.
An Innocuous Example
Van de Venis gives an innocuous example of how nature rights would supposedly benefit all:
A compelling precedent occurred in New Zealand when the Crown planned a bridge across the Whanganui River. Rather than a law suit or instantly stopping construction, the legal structure of legal personhood, forced the Crown and the Māori to collaborate within the legal personhood framework if there were to be a bridge, with a design to serve community needs without compromising the health of the river. The project in the end was so successfully adapted that Māori representatives celebrated its opening with a traditional haka.
Aw, isn’t that sweet? But look at what it took just to build one bridge!
Now, consider the infinite number of complex economic interactions needed to sustain modern economies — establishing electrical grids, paving roads, erecting buildings, mining copper (already impeded by nature rights lawsuits in Panama and Ecuador) and lithium, assembling automobiles and airplanes, extracting fossil fuels (a prime target of nature rights), irrigating fields, international shipping, etc. These and myriad other activities that support modern life are already difficult enough to sustain because of zoning, permit requirements, environmental regulations, and litigation. If the rights of nature also had to be considered, they would become all but impossible.
To the contrary, van de Venis insists, nature rights would not harm human society at all:
The misconception is that granting rights to nature simply leads to more court cases, red tape, and stalled projects. In reality, the true core of the movement is to translate a fundamental moral imperative — taking into account the interests of all life and future generations — into a legally binding principle. Far from being a mechanism to block human progress, it serves as a constructive tool to guide development and build the sustainable future envisioned by the Sustainable Development Goals.
If that’s your story, you stick to it. But I don’t believe it for a second.
Non-Threatening Demeanors
Nature rights activists tend to be mild-mannered and polite. Good for them. But what they intend — in van de Venis’s words, that “nature’s core rights to life, health, and flourishing…must [be taken] into account” in everything we do — is profoundly subversive.
We can’t let activists’ non-threatening demeanors seduce us into complacency. A world in which the most radical environmentalist could sue any project the litigant believed violated nature’s rights “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” would be Luddite in the extreme. Rather than being a “constructive tool” to building a cleaner and more beneficent tomorrow, the triumph of nature rights would be catastrophic.
Cross-posted at National Review.