Are social and environmental rights compatible? Young Researchers Debate

Authors: Erica Colman-Denstad, Guisela Camacho-Mejia, Cristiana Voinov, and Kylie Wrigley

The following piece is adapted from the 2019 Arne Naess Symposium Young Researchers Challenge. Inspired by the theme of the symposium—have we lost the battle for social and environmental rights? — the Arne Næss stipend recipients developed a form of polemic on the compatibility of social and environmental rights. They debated in two teams: Erica Colman-Denstad and Kylie Wrigley for the motion; Guisela Camacho-Mejia and Cristiana Voinov against it. The arguments were developed as a cohesive whole by all four researchers. As such, no argument represents the views or research focus of any individual. The debate was moderated by Nina Witoszek, the coordinator of the Arne Næss Programme on Global Justice and the Environment.

Erica Colman-Denstad: Bachelor and Master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Oslo. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Development and the Environment, UiO.

Guisela Camacho-Mejia: Bachelor's degree in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (liberal arts and legal studies) and Master’s Degree in Philosophy in Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Oslo.

Cristiana Voinov: Master of Philosophy candidate at The Center for Development and the Environment, University of Oslo. Researcher, performer, and environmental ethicist-in-training.

Kylie Wrigley: Master’s candidate in Development, Environment, and Cultural Change. Comes from an assortment of countries and holds a Bachelor of Science in Geography and Environmental Management with experience as a climate justice community organizer and a sustainability officer. She has researched the advocacy of the degrowth movement.

Argument 1: We have lost the battle for social and environmental rights.

Here is a statement that elicits plentiful frowns: environmental rights and social rights are incompatible. Our argument is a pragmatic one: that social rights are themselves a costly and complex endeavor currently based in a neoliberal growth paradigm which necessitates the exploitation of nature. First, we will show the ways in which the growth model inhibits nature’s rights. We will also provide examples of how enshrining the rights of nature has done little in the way of improving the state of the natural world, and has in fact led to the disenfranchisement of the peoples living in those spaces. Second, we will show that there are functional, and moreover, ideological impasses that have stifled compatibility and will continue to stifle compatibility, and that, given the rush against time to stay within a 2-degree global temperature limit, there is no time left to change.

First, in the current neoliberal system, the fulfillment of social rights essentially depends on a robust and stable economy based on the unsustainable extraction of natural resources — the Welfare State is, in fact, the Wealthy State. Therefore, the well-being of a populace — in the fullest sense of the word — is realized through stable material conditions: nutritious food, plentiful water, clean air, and stable shelter. The way most of us currently access material goods is through capitalism — a system implicitly reliant on resource consumption. These systemic mechanisms predicated on growth render the question of compatibility between environment and society ultimately meaningless; you must exploit one (the environment) for the other (society). The brutal expulsions that Saskia Sassen speaks of, where people are physically and mentally torn from land and stability for some other gain, signals a deep-seated, mechanistic corruption in financial and legal systems — ruled by the elites that dictate how the game gets played.

We observe the links between social securities and natural resources in national, international, and transnational governance based on the need to serve humans, not nature. At the international level, the General Assembly of the United Nations, for example, has rarely used language relating to the rights of nature, and only insofar as it serves to “protect,” “respect,” or “fulfill” the needs of human beings, not of the environment in and of itself. Therefore, it is not environmental rights, but rather the individual’s right to the environment that is valued. This valuing is translated into a reliance, or instrumentalization, of nature to generate wealth.

At the national level, we’ve broadly accepted environmental rights through lawmaking although the impact has been abysmal. In fact, according to a UN report released in 2019 on worldwide environmental policy, 176 countries have environmental framework laws, and 150 have a “right to a healthy environment” enshrined in their constitutions. Yet these laws are often defied for some other gain. In other words, there is little incentive, and no enforcement to adhere to the so-called rights of the environment. The fact that the non-profit ocean-policing Sea Shepherd exists is indicative of this paltry state of environmental protectionism. Everything is fun and games until they sink your illegal fishing vessel.

Consider the example of Norway, a country that leads the Human Development Index in almost every aspect — health, education, and employment — but has, as its main economic driver, the oil industry. Moreover, through the Government Pension Fund, the wellbeing and financial wealth of future Norwegian generations are not found in the protection of nature, but in its exploitation. Although Norway’s 1 trillion-dollar fund aims to cut oil and gas investments, the Finance Minister has stated that “the oil industry will be an important and major industry in Norway for many years to come.” Thus, the satisfaction of social, economic, and cultural rights rests on an industry whose environmental impacts are mainly negative.

This case exemplifies the incompatibility of achieving social rights in harmony with environmental rights. However, we have not analyzed whether this incompatibility persists when the relationship is inverted. Is it possible to protect environmental rights in harmony with social rights? Let’s take a look at the larger international endeavor that aims to protect vulnerable ecosystems and species: the creation of protected areas.

According to the UN Environment Programme, in 2018, there were 238,563 designated protected areas covering over 20 million square kilometers, which represents 14.87% of the earth’s land surface (excluding Antarctica). There is no larger and more organized international endeavor to protect environmental rights. However, protected areas have been accused of exacerbating current inequalities and leading to human rights abuses. For instance, the first modern protected areas (Yellowstone National Park, 1872, and Yosemite National Park, 1890) were created after the USA’s government expelled the Native Americans who lived there. As stated by the Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, forced displacement from protected areas has led to marginalization, impoverishment, food insecurity, extrajudicial killings, and denial of access to justice and remedy of local communities and their members. Under a paradigm that considers protected areas as pure wilderness areas free of human interference, nature conservation inevitably requires the restriction of local communities’ entitlements to use natural resources for survival purposes.

In response to the damaging effects of forced displacement of local communities from protected areas, a new approach to conservation emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. This approach encouraged the participation of local communities in protected areas as a way to reconcile environmental protection and social rights. Unfortunately, this approach has not delivered sustained results in practice. For instance, according to the Global Protected Planet Report 2018, most protected areas do not encourage the participation of local communities nor effectively share with them decision-making power over access to natural resources.

In consequence, the protection of nature as an end in itself has shown negative impacts in guaranteeing the socio and economic rights of the most vulnerable groups: indigenous peoples, peasant communities, and rural area residents. Attempts to remove people from their environment is more of a band-aid solution, where governments and industries are satisfied with merely providing lip-service to green causes by removing the most vulnerable from green spaces instead of actively creating conditions for them to flourish alongside the land.

Second, ethical discourse is steeped in the language of justice and fair distribution of benefits and burdens, particularly within climate change rhetoric. Yet, neutrality is practically impossible. Where does national identity stand when confronted with conflicting calls to “love thy neighbor?” As A. MacIntyre points out, “What your community requires as the material prerequisites for your survival as a distinctive community and your growth into a distinctive nation may be the exclusive use of the same or some of the same natural resources as my community requires for its survival and growth into a distinctive nation. When such a conflict arises, the standpoint of impersonal morality requires an allocation of goods such that each individual person counts for one and no more than one, while the patriotic standpoint requires that I strive to further the interests of my community and you to strive to further those of yours.”

Here’s the kicker: we have no time left to change. There are too many disparities to account for — political, economic, critical, moral, and cultural. The biggest hurdle is ourselves. Ibsen said it well: “When a man has interests of his own to protect, he cannot think of everything.” This is not some dramatization of a general truth about ourselves — we are confronted daily with examples to support it. Consider the failure that is the Paris Agreement. The fate of the climate crisis relies on curbing the consumption of the world’s biggest emitters — China and the US — and yet they are too busy participating in a game of economic and political chicken to adhere to any climate agreement. Lest we forget, “Trump digs coal!” Europe is not free from criticism either. Given Boris Johnson’s intention of turning the UK into a tax haven, it becomes hard to envision a UK that is anything more than, at best, apathetic about the environment.

Of course, we can’t only blame our governments. We citizens know better; we agree that climate change is real — as long as we don’t have to build a windmill in our own backyard. Change is indeed hard, especially changes that require reconfiguring deeply anchored cultural values. But profound hypocrisy exists in countries where talk about “change” is abundant but action is not. The hegemonic discourse continues to talk about climate change solutions steeped in the familiar rhetoric of technological innovation and growth, the very thing that stifles a truly robust relationship with the environment.

We have placed ourselves squarely in the center of the world; the whole system has at its very core the protection of human beings. As the UDHR states: the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world is the recognition of the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family — all but ignoring environmental rights. This is unsurprising: we are in a system where most of us have to make a profit to survive, and in doing so, we are urged to ignore all the side-effects. We are not going to change in time because this is the value set we’re working with — it’s taken centuries to shape these values, and will take centuries more to reimagine them. The IPCC says we have 11 years to drastically lower emissions and prevent a climate catastrophe. In the words of #MeToo, time’s up.

Argument 2: The battle for social and environmental rights is not yet lost.

We will argue that social and environmental rights are compatible. They are compatible, but they are difficult to attain and uphold within a system that favors unsustainable progress and profit over justice. This is also why they are necessary. We will make this argument in three parts: first, we will demonstrate that social and environmental rights are contrasted not against each other, but against the mutual opponent of oppressive structures that force us to weigh short-term gains for the few more heavily than the long-term interests of us all. Second, we will demonstrate that this argument holds true in practice as well as in theory by giving examples of promising ways that issues of social and environmental rights have been tackled together. Finally, we will argue that there is still time to effect radical change, in 2020 we are all living proof of that.

In a 2017 UN Report of the Special Rapporteur on the issue of human rights obligations relating to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, it is stated that “the full enjoyment of human rights, including the rights to life, health, food, and water, depends on the services provided by ecosystems,” and that “the degradation and loss of biodiversity undermine the ability of human beings to enjoy their human rights.” Mass extinction and displacement of people (due to drought, flooding, rising sea levels, and untenable land resulting from climate change) are obvious examples.

The opposing team’s argument that communities within protected areas are worse off is misleading. While some parts of society might benefit from unsustainable extractive practices, degradation of ecosystems is likely to reinforce existing patterns of discrimination against the most vulnerable sectors of society. However, “development” does not depend on this form of extraction. An example is “buen vivir,” or the “living well” movement of Latin America. This movement is concerned with consuming less and developing a sense of the collective. It suggests a form of development that sees social, cultural, environmental, and economic values as working together, as opposed to separately or in opposition to one another. This movement demonstrates that environmental and social needs are mutually compatible and do not have to be traded off against each other.

Arne Næss (1989) built his environmental philosophy on the foundation that all living beings have long-term interests in common. This is not merely a philosophical argument. People all over the world are recognizing not only the compatibility but the dependence of humans on the rest of nature. A powerful example is the global phenomenon of climate change lawsuits initiated by people who recognize that the rights of future generations are being threatened by governments and businesses who are failing to protect them from climate change. Similarly, we are seeing an international movement of students participating in school strikes demanding action to prevent further global warming and climate change. The dependence of human communities on nature is by no means a new discovery, but it is a truth that is becoming increasingly important to explicitly acknowledge in the face of our current environmental crisis. It must also be acknowledged that humanity has progressed to the point where we have the power to determine not only how we live, but what lives. Philosopher Hans Jonas (1984) argues that because of this power, humans have obligations towards future generations and the biosphere. In many arenas, we have bestowed rights to both social and environmental systems. Environmental protection is enshrined by the Stockholm Declaration and the Kyoto Protocol. This demonstrates that there is a broad acceptance of these obligations — that power implies responsibility. Our challenge is to enforce these protections in the face of competing agendas.

Although the needs of humans and those of the environment are one and the same, we live in a time where they are all too often pitted against each other — not for the benefit of human flourishing, not for the benefit of nature’s conservation, but for the benefit of “predatory systems” that undermine them both. The processes Saskia Sassen describes in her book Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014) and in her lecture in the Arne Næss symposium in which this debate originally took place are examples of such predatory systems.

This leads us to our second argument. Indeed, there are oppressive systems and powerful actors that put short-term, self-motivated gains over the fulfillment of social and environmental rights. They permeate our collective consciousness daily and leading us to believe the future is grim. However, these stories do not have to become self-fulfilling prophecies. We argue that there are cases where rights that defend the dignity of both humans and nature are successfully being pursued together. These stories demand your attention.

There is a trend of corporations with a conscience working with civil society, self-enforcing rules and metrics to protect the environment and the well-being of people at work. One particular form of this is the Benefit Corporation. B-Corps make use of legal mechanisms to change their statutes and make it a legal requirement that managers, workers, and suppliers work together to prioritize people and the planet — in addition to — dare we say it — profit. B-Corps such as Patagonia are proving that business is about more than the bottom line and shareholder profit. As such, they are unlike traditional corporations, which can be prone to shortsightedness and make insufficient investments in their workers and communities.

Another example is Mondragon Corporation in Spain, the world’s biggest workers’ cooperative. Mondragon Corporation is a highly successful example of a caring form of capitalism. Adopting a humanist business philosophy, they ensure that people at work are empowered and have good and fairly distributed wages. They comply with international environmental certifications and sustainability practices and are a leader in recycling and reuse. Having met the social needs of its employees there is good reason to believe its structure can facilitate the quick uptake of environmental solutions and policies as they emerge.

Of course, while many CEOs, boards, executives, and staffers want to do the right thing, we all know they have competitors who do not. For some, the business of business is still business. Does this mean we are doomed? No! It means there is work yet to be done — work to shift values and popularise collectivist, prosocial, nature-centered stories.

The legal and financial systems that currently perpetuate the failings of capitalism and corruption are merely tools that we design to achieve the priorities of our choosing. They do not determine whether we “win or lose” the battle for social and environmental rights. Only we can do that. Thus, if the rules of our financial and legal systems are not being respected, we should not admit defeat as our debate opposition has. Rather, we ought to change the rules of the game — change the values accounted for in economic modeling and discourse.

Eva Joly, who inspired this debate, is an example of the immense effort to address and improve the coherence of international tax rules to end tax avoidance and base erosion while also promoting eco-philosophic logic and values. She is not alone. More and more, corporations with a conscience are working towards leveling the playing field by calling for regulations against bribery in the form of aggressive lobbying. Moreover, some are self-enforcing rules to protect the environment and the health and safety of people at work.

We need to listen to and tell stories to climb out of the wreckage of what is no longer serving the majority of people and the planet. You can start to do that by paying attention to what’s working in your town. Are you supporting the collectives and cooperatives in your town, initiating projects from wetland restoration to cultural exchanges with newly migrated members in the community? In Oslo, my home at the time of writing, the municipality introduced the first-ever climate budget along with procurement strategies that support the climate and environment that houses its citizens. This isn’t unique to the Scandinavian socialist mentality. Back in Australia, my permanent home, there are good stories to share even though climate denialism and environmental deregulation are rampant. Collie is a town demonstrating that they can “repower” and redefine themselves as they transition away from coal. By placing the dignity and prosperity of the community, workers, and planet at the center of their mindset, they see no reason for anyone to be left behind in a sustainable and just transition. They offer great hope for other communities previously thought to be reliant on the fossil fuel industry. There are also Working on Country programs that empower indigenous rangers to combine traditional knowledge with modern techniques to protect and care for the land and sea. They are delivering outstanding social, economic, cultural, and environmental outcomes. They need more funding and support.

Yes, these actions are small and localized — but arguably, that is why they work. Cumulatively they offer us scalable and far-reaching action towards environmental protection and social justice: partial solutions solve whole problems. It is necessary to popularise stories at home and around the world that show how social and environmental rights and responsibilities can and are being upheld together. When states, communities, and businesses work together to keep the utilitarian logic of the market in check, it is possible to deliver more than shareholder profit.

Unfortunately, people might retaliate against these stories and ideologically alienate anyone and any idea that dares try to salvage the best of human nature, the best of business, and policies that offer us scalable and far-reaching climate action, environmental safeguarding, and social prosperity. In doing so, they (and our debate opponents) stress the limitations of any idea that tries to make the rights of the environment and people compatible. Such arguments offer us no hope and nothing with which to — as is often paraphrased from Arne Næss — “think beautifully and act dutifully.” When we use war metaphors of losing the battle we set ourselves up to fail. Our existence need not read as a tragedy — we need new narratives.

We make our arguments not as starry-eyed optimists but as people paying attention to history, language, and psychology. Over the last decade, the Yale Climate Change in the American Mind study found that there is a growing pessimism that people will successfully address climate change. Psychology tells us that the dominant framing of environmental doomism that fosters a climate of anxiety and inaction. If we keep saying the world is ending, who could blame someone for all the existential dread? Why not take an overseas holiday, seek out hedonistic vices while there is time, and live in denial. Moreover, we ought to be careful of arguments that create a sense of urgency. They risk rushing authoritarian right-wing tactics and can lead us into a cognitive dissonance that perpetuates the problems we collectively face.

When this debate took place, we rebutted the argument that the time is up to act on climate change and that any change will be too slow with an example from the Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894. Change can happen exponentially if there is a will to act. Come 2020, we have a global pandemic to demonstrate this point even better. The prediction that London and New York would be nine feet deep in horse shit was successfully avoided. The cleanup and introduction of cars may have unintentionally brought about new forms of pollution — technology and human innovation do not offer a silver bullet — but such is the circular nature of things decay and revival, learning and improving. Indeed, the response to “flatten the curve” has been a rapid trial and error exercise to preserve human life. Notably, we saw some conservative governments react by prioritizing social protection and welfare. More commonly, we have seen communities and policies of care are being strengthened, solidarity is felt, and essential workers are being recognized. This virus holds a mirror to the vulnerabilities and inequalities designed into our modern neo-liberal systems and reminds us that respect for the natural environment is where it all begins, and that through the power of will, the seemingly impossible can be done.

To conclude, social and environmental rights face common enemies: unless we challenge these enemies and pursue both sets of rights together, we will fail to achieve them both. It is imperative that we support and enact the stories of actions that work towards the achievement of social and environmental rights as one. These reinforce the best of human nature, including our universal values of dignity, collaboration, fairness, and ambition. And it is these that will make the seemingly incompatible become compatible.