When Rachel Carson published Silent spring In 1962, his words, with their graphic warnings on pesticides, gave birth to a new environmental conscience which had still not reached my corner of London in the mid -1970s, when I was a schoolboy. We have learned to dissect the eye of a lamb but nothing of the relationship of man with the natural world. The new conscience has also not filtered in consumer education when I was a law student, without environment Proposed courses even if the ozone layer of the earth has enlightened and that new global rules have been proclaimed to protect the oceans of the world.
For international law, which began to pay great attention to environmental problems, the time of catalytic change came with the Chornobyl nuclear accident in April 1986. While radioactive rains fell to Wales and elsewhere, farmers were prohibited from selling their lamb. As a young academic, I was invited to Washington to a conference on international law and the pollution of the cross -border air, of which I did not know anything.
One thing led to another, while I read Carson, gave a conference, published a book and started to write legal opinions on various subjects, from nuclear pollution to the conservation of whales. Along the way, a colleague introduced me to “Should the trees have standing?», An article in the Revue du Law (and later a book) of a Californian academic published a decade after Carson. Since our society is used to the “business personality”, wrote Christopher Stone, why could natural ecosystems not have their own rights?
The responses to Stone's ideas were generally in disorder, perplexed or hostile. My initial reaction was quite skeptical, to come from the professional age as I did in a Britain who still had trouble imagining that humans had rights; Recognize the rights of trees, bees or rivers seemed to be a big jump.
However, Stone's article was so finely written and original, and large-scale in its originality, that it sowed a seed which took root, gnawing at my prejudices in favor of a legal order focused on the well-being of the human. I came to see that I was anchored in a legal order which put humans at us at the heart of everything and that the environmental rules with which I committed myself had no interest in protecting the environment as an end in itself.
The heart of the question raised by Carson and Stone was the fundamentally anthropocentric nature of our legal worldAnd over time, other writers have taken the cakes for a more ecocentric approach, which makes the well-being of the natural world in itself. This is the direction now taken by renowned writer Robert Macfarlane, in his latest book Is a river alive?
Recognizing a debt towards Stone, he takes us to a series of exhilarating trips around the world, urging us to acquire rights in natural objects. Where Stone offered ideas of law, Macfarlane confronts the realities of the living and beating the heart of the river world. It accompanies us in an Ecuadorian cloud forest and the upstream waters of the río los cedros; On the “injured, lagoons and estuaries” of the dying waters of the city of Chennai India; And then at Shipipu Mutehekau (or at the Magpie River), 600 miles northeast of Montreal. On the way, we meet convincing characters – the rights of the nature fighters powered by the writings of Ursula k Guin And John Le Carré; People with the spirit of the steel attachment who can recite 400 -line poems; And detrimental creatures that transform “the shit of life into something precious” (a quality that the human world is terribly below these days).
With clarity and crystalline force, MacFarlane confronts the raw failure of our existing laws to protect rivers from damage and houses in the developments of this post-date stone. Meanwhile, he recognizes the beliefs of indigenous communities, which have adopted a world vision focused on nature during millennia. He wrote the constitution of the equator, modified in 2008 to recognize the rights of the exploitable nature; of a judgment of the high court of the Uttarakhand, in 2017, decreasing that the Ganges river is recognized as a “living entity” with rights under the law; And resolutions adopted by Aboriginal First Nations communities and local authorities that recognize the Magpie river as a “legal person” with “fundamental rights”.
Such ideas are given by the quality of writing, the evocation of mood and place, raw odors and energies that accompany MacFarlane, whether in a sweet walk in a Cambridge wood, or by rushing with a deadly speed in a rapid Canadian. We are affected by the “steam oven and glossy of green” which is the forest of clouds, or the “fine and derivative spray” launched by a “jump and passionate” stream. We feel it “burn the cold in the throat and the belly” of fresh water. We fear and wonder the changes, “blue-black and shiny” of the quieter race of a river until it transforms “green, gold and cream” in the fall, then “whirlwind” with the tranquility of deep and slow water.
MacFarlane offers the power and speed of the natural world, in a style familiar to its many readers, but now adopting a more openly political tone, with a call to a new direction. Our classical laws, built around humans, have failed, and we need another means, which breaks the chains of our imagination learned and inherited, and the limits of the legal intuitions that have trapped us. Imagine that a river lives and has its own rights, maintains Macfarlane.
“What does such recognition mean for perception, law and politics?” His question is particularly relevant in a Britain where a “gradual and desperate calamity has struck our rivers and our streams”. Who, he asks, will protect the rights of the river? Who will determine how his rights must be balanced with ours? How will conflicts be resolved, whose rights will prevail and which will decide? Today, these are real questions in Ecuador, India and elsewhere.
MacFarlane calls for a convincing way of thinking, a way of dropping the approach conceived in 1992, during the United Nations Historical Conference in Rio, that “human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development”.
This is the established anthropocentric approach which dominates political discourse on environmental issues. He infuses our lawyers and judges and writers, and is again in Just the earthBy Tony Juniper, an activist who has devoted his life to environmental issues and is now president of Natural England, an official United Kingdom Conservation Agency.
Juniper's latest book explores our existential challenges, recognizing that our environmental program is “ecologically condemned” and that “new ideas” are necessary. His idea is to focus on social and economic factors, in conviction that less inequality and more equity would offer greater respect for ecological borders, opportunities and a better quality of life “for everyone”.
Supporting evidence is thin, as is the assertion that it also offers cleaner rivers. Juniper wants the action of “resources focused” companies, states devoted to “economic growth” and indigenous groups, whose “world vision focused on nature” which he celebrates but does not adopt. At the same time, it highlights the “austere divergence” between the visions of the Western and Aboriginal world, and evokes the words of King Charles III recently proposed in Dubai: “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth.”
However, the approach remains obstinately anthropocentric, focusing on human law with “a clean and healthy environment” and such questions, as well as the laws that protect our “future generations”. The environment is, in fact, a slideshow to protect to better protect ourselves.
Juniper's argument can have legs and decency, but it does not start to approach the fundamental principles of our inhumanities to nature, nor how to approach them. The approach is not “radical” or “revolutionary”, as its publishers say. He offers a handyman and an inclination to modern windmills, he feels tired and entirely overshadowed by the energy of MacFarlane's ideas, his writing firmly inscribed in the power of Rachel Carson.
Carson helped us think differently, and even pushed Richard Nixon to establish the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States. Half a century later, another Republican president seems determined to destroy this institution and its achievements, eliminating most of its budget and many programs, including the environmental justice office which approaches the poisoning of the poor and the disadvantaged. “Drill, baby, forest,” proclaims Trump, a most modern incarnation of the piercing observation of Carson according to which “the war against the nature of man is inevitably a war against himself”.
What I recently went to see for myself a few years ago, sitting on a rim of UTAH, above the San Juan river snaping while it spoke through the rock of the GOOSENCKS state park, hundreds of feet below. For three million years, this now exhausted river crossed the earth and the rock, a magical combination of water, gravity, wind and ice. On the main ladders, this natural world will go well, suggested my hiking companion; It is only we who do not close it.
Could it be so hard, asked Christopher Stone decades ago and MacFarlane again asked today to find another way? It seems that yes, a question that resonates more and more powerfully.
Is a river alive? by Robert MacFarlane Hamish Hamilton £ 25 / WW NORTON $ 31.99, 384 pages
Just Earth: How a fairer world will save the planet by Tony Juniper Bloomsbury £ 20, 368 pages
Philippe Sands KC is a law professor at the University College in London. His latest book is'38 Street London: On impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia ”(Weidenfeld & Nicolson). His next book will be on the ecocide
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