Why We Call Them 'Human' Rights
SMITH, WESLEY J.
Why We Call Them Human Rights Ecuador just gave every virus, bacterium, insect, tree & weed constitutional rights. BY WESLEY J. SMITH Rights, properly understood, are moral entitlements...
...BY WESLEY J. SMITH Rights, properly understood, are moral entitlements embodied in law to protect all people...
...This doctrine of human exceptionalism has been under assault in recent decades from many quarters...
...What does this co-equal legal status between humans and nature mean...
...So, too, are bacteria, insects, trees, weeds, and snails...
...any radical environmental organization can descend on Ecuador and sue to thwart the desires of the farmer and prevent him from deciding what to do with his own land...
...This tenet is now under energetic, and increasingly successful, attack...
...Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultan...
...The constitution, moreover, explicitly empowers organizations like CELDF to enforce nature’s fundamental rights...
...The European Court of Human Rights recently accepted a case out of Austria that appeals a ruling that refused to declare chimpanzees legal persons...
...Article 1 states: Every person, people, community, or nationality, will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies [i.e., courts, governmental agencies, etc...
...If the Ecuadorian government fails to protect the rights of the swamp (or the trees, the animals on the mineable mountain, the schools of fi sh, etc...
...Just this year: ¶ The Socialists and Greens in Spain are on the verge of granting the rights to life, liberty, and freedom from torture to great apes and devolve humans into a “community of equals” with chimpanzees and gorillas...
...And it is not just in Ecuador that the international left has demonstrated its determination to devalue humankind in law and ethics...
...But the concept of nature possessing rights seems to be spreading...
...These radical agendas have now been overtaken by an extreme environmentalism that seeks to—and this is not a parody—grant equal rights to nature...
...The new Ecuadorian constitution reads: Persons and people have the fundamental rights guaranteed in this Constitution and in the international human rights instruments...
...These and the rest of Ecuador’s fl ora and fauna all now have the constitutional and legally enforceable right to exist, persist, and regenerate their vital cycles...
...It is a self-demotion of humankind to merely one among the billions of life forms on earth—no more worthy of protection than any other aspect of the natural world...
...Now, the swamp has equal rights with the farmer, as do the mosquitoes, snakes, pond scum, rats, spiders, trees, and fi sh that reside therein...
...This principle was most eloquently enunciated in the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that we are all created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...literally and explicitly...
...The mainstream media have made no attempt to sound the alarm about the dangers of this agenda...
...Switzerland has constitutionally established the intrinsic dignity of individual plants, based on the many similarities they share with us at the molecular and cellular levels...
...The CELDF—which was only founded in 1995—brags that it is fielding calls from South Africa, Italy, Australia, and Nepal, that last of which is crafting its own leftist constitution...
...If such antihumanism prevails, we won’t have to worry about nature having rights, but about human beings losing them...
...The mind simply boggles...
...A New York Times environmental blogger was bemused by the Ecuadorian constitution, and an editorial in the Los Angeles Times found Ecuador’s proposal to make nature the moral equal of people “intriguing...
...And since draining the swamp would unquestionably destroy “nature” and prevent it from “existing” and “persisting,” one can conceive of the farmer—or miners, loggers, fi shermen, and other users and developers of natural resources—being not only prevented from earning his livelihood, but perhaps even charged with oppressing nature...
...Why We Call Them Human Rights Ecuador just gave every virus, bacterium, insect, tree & weed constitutional rights...
...They are not earned: Rights come as part of the package of being a member of the human race...
...The potential harm to human welfare seems virtually unlimited...
...Animal rights ideology similarly denies the intrinsic value of being human, claiming that we and animals are moral equals based on our common capacity to feel pain, a concept known as “painience...
...Others might say that worrying about nature’s rights should take a back seat to less abstract concerns such as the fi nancial crisis and the war on terror...
...Nature rights” have just been embodied as the highest law of the land in Ecuador’s newly ratifi ed constitution pushed by the country’s hardleftist president, Rafael Correa, an acolyte of Hugo Ch?vez...
...Take, for example, a farmer who wishes to drain a swamp to create more tillable land to better support his family...
...Some might say that Ecuador is a small country not worth much concern...
...But consider this: The central importance of human life is the fundamental insight undergirding Western civilization...
...For example, many bioethicists assert that being human alone does not convey moral value, rather an individual must exhibit “relevant” cognitive capacities to claim the rights to life and bodily integrity...
...Yes, nature...
...Nature is subject to those rights given by this Constitution and Law...
...This goes way beyond establishing strict environmental protections as a human duty...
...Viruses are part of nature...
...Article 1 states: Nature or Pachamama [the Goddess Earth], where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution...
...The inspiration for Ecuador’s granting of rights to nature was an American extremist environmental group called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which presses to “change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities...
Vol. 14 • November 2008 • No. 10
