This is the final post in a series related to Teaching Environmental Law in Context, a recent book by Member Scholars Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez.
When I teach domestic or international environmental law, I often ask students early on: Why should we protect the environment? What should the goal of environmental law be?
Sometimes, they say that we should protect the environment for its own sake. The species and ecosystems that make up the natural world, and perhaps the natural world itself, should be recognized as having intrinsic value, apart from whatever value they provide human beings. Aldo Leopold called this attitude the “land ethic,” writing in A Sand County Almanac in 1949 that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” This way of looking at the world has deep roots in Indigenous worldviews, and it has many adherents today. Its influence can be seen in laws such as the Endangered Species Act, which protect species regardless of whether they provide benefits in measurable, human terms.
Nevertheless, students usually say that the most compelling reason to protect the environment is to protect human beings. For most of us, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see ourselves as just another part of the world, rather than its center. Domestic statutes such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, and international treaties like the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer and the Paris Agreement on climate change, are designed to further human interests. In the terms we teach students to use, the laws are “anthropocentric,” not “ecocentric.”
However, the longer I teach, the more I find this framing inadequate. For one thing, the line between anthropo- and eco-centrism can be artificial and misleading because it presumes the choice is either-or, us or Nature, as if humans are somehow separate from the natural world rather than part of it.
But even worse, as the students delve into the details of the treaties, statutes, and regulations, they find the laws don’t seem to be anthropo- or eco-centric; rather, they’re techno-centric. The laws may refer to human interests, but their focus is either at very high levels of abstract purposes, or at microscopic levels of regulatory detail. As Amy Sinden explains in her contribution to this series, the actual people whose health and well-being depend on a healthy environment often seem to be lost behind a thicket of technical acronyms.
Environmental law has had some real successes, but its technocentrism has led to some real failures, too. The most catastrophic is that marginalized communities — for example, communities of people who are discriminated against because of their race and/or poverty — are forced to bear disproportionate burdens of environmental harm. Despite decades of environmental regulation, and truly heroic efforts by advocates for environmental justice, the U.S. landscape still has many areas so polluted that their inhabitants face the choice of being subjected to high levels of illness and injury or abandoning their homes and history. These “sacrifice zones” exist all over the country, but they have remained largely invisible to environmental law.
In Teaching Environmental Law in Context, Rebecca Bratspies and Carmen Gonzalez show that it doesn’t have to be that way. On every page of their innovative, idealistic, but imminently practical book, they give concrete recommendations on how to center human stories in environmental teaching. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, if the book is as widely adopted as it should be, it would revolutionize how we present the field to our students.
Their book is part of a broader revolution in environmental law and policy that is sweeping across the world (despite resistance by the United States and other governments). That revolution seeks to reimagine environmental law by marrying it to human rights law. It declares that every human on the planet has the right to live in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
This revolution has been building for a long time. In 1968, two years before Sen. Gaylord Nelson helped organize the first Earth Day, he proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution simply saying, “Every person has the inalienable right to a decent environment.” Although his efforts failed, Pennsylvania and several other U.S. states amended their constitutions to include the right. And advocates in other countries, especially in the Global South, found more success. Today, most countries have recognized the right in their national constitutions and/or written it into binding treaties.
In 2022, the right was finally accepted globally, when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The vote was overwhelming: 161 in favor and none against. After spending much of the previous 40 years opposing efforts to recognize the right at the United Nations, the U.S. government publicly reversed its position and joined the majority. Three years later, the International Court of Justice issued a unanimous opinion on climate change, in which it said not only that the right is part of international law, but also that States have legal obligations to mitigate climate change — and to protect the environment generally — in order to protect human rights.
I have had the privilege of seeing this environmental human rights revolution from a front-row seat. Between 2012 to 2018, I served as the first UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment. I and my successors, David Boyd and Astrid Puentes, as well as other UN special rapporteurs, have described how human rights can be and are being brought to bear on environmental issues. We witnessed and reported on how courageous advocates have used environmental human rights law to fight for their communities, their countries, and the world as a whole, in the face of threats, harassment, and even death.
One of the many virtues of Teaching Environmental Law in Context is that it makes the stakes of that struggle real to students. Every chapter of the book centers people, and the last two — which I must say are the two closest to my heart — explain how environmental advocates can use explicit rights-based arguments in state law and before international forums.
By showing how the context for teaching environmental law includes the right of all human beings to enjoy a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, Rebecca and Carmen connect the struggle for environmental justice in the United States to the broader struggle for environmental human rights around the world.
