We Can’t Keep Trampling Nature’s Rights If We Want to Survive

Endangered Species Day was last week. It came and went with little fanfare. Flag Day gets more respect, even though those human-made pieces of fabric do nothing to keep the planet alive.

The arsonists in power care so little about lives beyond their own that they want to eviscerate the federal Endangered Species Act. The destruction of habitat seems to be the country’s unofficial mission.

We should be celebrating, every day, endangered species and the rest of the natural world. We should be protecting, every day, the habitats where they live, breed, feed, and play.

We do the opposite, every day. We prioritize politics over science and profits over protections. We allow, even support and encourage, greater destruction of flora and fauna with drilling, fracking, mining, logging, and development that is largely catered to the wealthy. Thoughtless consumption is relentlessly marketed. Plastics mindlessly overproduced.

Conservation should actually be a real American value.

For the past 52 years, the Endangered Species Act has helped balance environmental protection with economic impact. The law has been a success, having helped save hundreds of species from extinction. Among the animals saved include the bald eagle, the national icon we plaster all over bastardized American flags.

The planet is in a biodiversity crisis — a sixth mass extinction powered by our hubris. The extinction rate of species is now about 1,000 times higher than before humans dominated the planet. We are the asteroid.

Earth is losing animal and plant species at an astonishing rate. The Endangered Species Act is our most powerful conservation law. Weakening it for political reasons and for the financial gains of the few could put up to a million species at risk of extinction.

The 1973 law should actually be strengthened, because rampant consumption and runaway expansion inside a finite system eventually lead to collapse. Habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, the overexploitation of wildlife, a growing invasion of invasive species, and the climate crisis don’t make for healthy living conditions, for neither us nor most of the planet’s other life.

The global human population is 8-plus billion, which represents about 0.01% of all living things. But our global ecological footprint is massive, surpassing Earth’s biocapacity by 35%, and growing. Since the dawn of civilization, Homo sapiens have caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of all plants. Much of what remains is for us to consume.

To extinguish the fire we set ablaze 232 years ago — when the first hydropower textile mill, in Pawtucket, R.I., kicked off the Industrial Revolution — requires taking environmental protection seriously. We can’t continue to rely on the tired corporate-controlled, business-as-usual model of environmental management. The free market isn’t the answer.

The Endangered Species Act should actually be expanded, to provide self-protective rights of law to natural systems and the biodiversity they support. Rights of nature was first introduced, at least to the capitalist world, in 1972 by University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone, who proposed that “we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment — indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”

The concept may seem irrational, especially when the arsonists are stripping away rights from humans, but what is unreasonable is the status quo, which allows politicians and the filthy rich to abuse the natural world so they can accumulate more wealth and power. Humanity’s well-being suffers and animals and plants disappear.

“Rather than treating nature as property under the law, the time has come to recognize that natural communities have the right to exist, maintain and regenerate their vital cycles,” according to the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. “Breaking out of the human-centered limitations of our current legal systems by recognizing, respecting and enforcing Rights of Nature is one of the most transformative and highly leveraged actions that humanity can take to create a sustainable future for all.”

Ecosystems — mature forests, coastal wetlands, rivers, mangroves, kelp forests, the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, Narragansett Bay — and fauna such as elephants, tigers, North Atlantic right whales, monarch butterflies, barn owls, eastern spadefoots, wood turtles, and bald eagles should be entitled to legal personhood status. They should have the right to defend themselves in court against human threats.

One of the largest toxic algal blooms ever recorded off the coast of California has led to thousands of marine animals and birds becoming sick or dying in recent months.

The toxin, domoic acid poisoning, attacks the nervous system of marine life, either killing them or making them appear drunk. Toxic algae is largely fed by human-caused pollution. Scientists are currently investigating whether the fire retardant used to fight California wildfires — strengthened by global warming — could be contributing to the magnitude of this deadly algal bloom.

The goal of conferring rights to nature is to secure environmental protections that allow ecosystems and the biodiversity they support to thrive, not just survive. After all, their health is our health. As their well-being declines and their health fails, so do ours.

Forests, rivers, the sea, and many other biomes provide the conditions for humans to thrive. We aren’t separate from nor superior to the natural world.

Nature isn’t rightless property we can just own, use, and destroy at will.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.