Year: 2025
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter is concerned with the relationship between human rights and the environment; we show that environmental human rights are but one step in the expansion of rights discourses, and not the final stop. Instead, the rights of nature or the environment have risen as a radical ecocentric alternative that makes human rights but a subset of these larger ones. We also question the linear story of a progressive passage of human rights all the way to the rights of nature by considering the development of legal pluralism, a movement that increasingly critiques the Western bias of law and uncovers other legal traditions that don’t depend on rights at all. So, the latest evolution of rights toward ecocentric law is both a critique of the dominant view of humans as the only bearers of rights, and itself the subject of challenges from ontological and legal pluralism. We conclude with some potential ways for dominant law to move beyond its reliance and, in some sense, obsession with rights.
Source: Routledge eBooks
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4412752164