Know Your Rights: Earth Jurisprudence and Environmental Politics in the Americas

Humphreys examines the origins, possibilities, and challenges of the rights of nature. While the recognition of nature’s rights holds out the possibility of an alternative approach to environmental management and politics, as well as to a fundamentally redefined relationship between nature and society, upholding rights of nature in practice may conflict with four other sets of rights in environmental politics: the sovereign rights of the state, human rights, property rights (or, more accurately, claims by people and organizations to property), and the rights of business corporations. The challenge for those who support rights of nature, asserts Humphreys, is how to promote both a wider uptake of the idea among political leaders and civil society, and a clearer long term vision of how upholding nature’s rights may be operationalized in practice.