Environmental Rights

The essays selected for this volume present critical viewpoints from the debate about the need to establish rights on behalf of greater environmental protection. Three main areas for developing environmental rights are surveyed, including: extensionist theories that link existing rights (for example to subsistence or territory) to threats of harm from exacerbated resource scarcity, pollution or rapid environmental change; proposals for rights to specified environmental goods or services, such as rights to a safe environment and the capacity to assimilate greenhouse gas emissions; and rights that protect the interests of parties not currently recognized as having rights, including nonhuman subjects, natural objects and future generations. This volume captures the potential for and primary challenges to the development of rights as instruments for safeguarding the planet's life-support capacities and features proposals and analyses which argue the need to create an avenue of recourse against ecological degradation, whether on behalf of human or nonhuman right holders.

Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder as well as Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University, Australia. He researches normative political theory and environmental politics and published Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, 2008 and Political Theory and Global Climate Change, MIT Press, 2008.