The Rights of Nature and the Future of Public Health

We are in the midst of a worldwide public health emergency. In October 2019, 11 000 scientists from more than 150 countries declared that human consumption and corporate overreach were degrading ecosystems and driving more than a million species to extinction, including humans.¹ The collective impact of dysregulated climate; disruption of the water, phosphorous, and nitrogen cycles; and the collapse of food chains causes widespread trauma, which fosters social and ecological violence. The World Health Organization estimates that avoidable environmental risk factors cause 12.6 million deaths each year around the globe.² Our current crisis is undoing 50 years of gains in public health.³ Such ecological devastation is associated with increased suicide, depression, isolation, and addiction.⁴ Those who suffer most from these ecological threats are least responsible: indigenous peoples, people who are poor, and communities of color.

Public health is faced with a choice at this critical moment. Do we continue with business as usual, addressing the diseases of modernity, such as heart disease, without questioning the values underlying modernity? Or do we do what we in public health are best suited to do: transform the paradigm of health to be more inclusive and better encompass our current challenges?

Through growing attention to social determinants of health, we now recognize that the zip code is a stronger determinant of health than our genetic code.⁵ But we need to keep pushing. In every zip code, a type of soil matrix based on a previously rich ecosystem of forests, savannahs, and waterways exists. In every zip code, there are animals and plants that are endangered. In every zip code, there is a water cycle dependent on seas, lakes, and forests that is threatened. In short, we humans are embedded in endangered ecosystems whether or not we are aware of it. In the privileged global north, many of us experience our embeddedness as an economic exchange: buying food, paying for water, and putting filters on indoor air systems. A simple walk in the woods, inhaling the cancer-protective, immune-boosting, and aromatic chemicals that trees exhale, reminds us that a richer relationship with our ecosystem is possible. What if we characterized human health as a process of being in healthy relationship with our ecosystems?

RIGHTS OF NATURE

Human rights are those freedoms meant to ensure that all people can live a life of security, dignity, and well-being. Human rights are primarily between individuals, communities, and states, without regard to ecosystems and the biosphere. Conversely, rights of nature laws focus on the rights of ecosystems to exist, persist, and regenerate without consideration of human benefit or corporate profit.⁶ Nature is defined broadly as ecosystems, rivers, streams, lakes, oceans, mountains, and even individual trees. Many governments treat nature’s systems as private property and allow owners to set terms of their relationships with their land and water. As private property, 95% of old growth forest in the United States has been logged, soils are running off into oceans, and water and air are filled with byproducts of industrial production. The dangers of such exploitation can be catastrophic to human health and well-being.

Without rights-based laws, communities such as those in Appalachia trying to protect their mountains and streams and the Oceti Sakowin (the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota nations) who sought to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline while trying to protect their water and sovereignty have only weak legal tools of public comment periods to assess business permits and regulations based on “maximum acceptable harms.” A rights of nature framework helps to move our attention from anthropocentrism to biocentrism, which more fully encompasses the processes by which we can ensure healthy conditions for people and the environment.

RIGHTS OF NATURE ORDINANCES

The rights of nature framework creates new avenues for widespread public health protections. The expansiveness of nature’s interconnected species, waterways, and weather patterns can promote international cooperation. For instance, the Guaraní Aquifer is the second largest freshwater aquifer in the world. It transcends political boundaries as it spans underneath Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil. The United Nations predicts that there will be a 40% shortfall in water availability by 2030, creating even greater urgency to solidify international cooperation to protect this water source. Rights of nature laws may help prevent future political disputes.

Supplying 20% of the earth’s oxygen, the Amazon rainforest is under threat as a result of fires set by multinational corporations supported by the Brazilian government. The plight of indigenous peoples of the Amazon is intricately tied to this ecological devastation, yet they have little political recourse or human rights protections. Indigenous communities have sought to defend their rights to land, water, and air from colonial and corporate encroachment for hundreds of years. Aside from the United Nations International Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the rights of nature have become another avenue for protection. Ecuador and Bolivia have enshrined rights of nature in their constitutions. In New Zealand, the Te Urewera forest and the Whanganui River now have personhood, and members of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in the United States passed a law formally recognizing the rights of Manoomin, their wild rice, to provide a legal basis to protect their rice and fresh water resources for future generations.

Rights of nature can be used to protect all people in many types of environments. After the deaths of two boys (11 and 17 years of age) from staph infections caused by exposure to toxic sludge, the people of Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvania used the rights of nature to protect their lands from sludge dumping. Since then, more than 20 communities around the United States have espoused rights of nature to protect water, soil, mountains, and streams. Lake Erie was recently granted rights after a three-day shutdown of the entire city of Toledo in summer 2014 due to contaminated drinking water. These ordinances allow humans to use legal avenues to protect the natural world around them.

Establishing legal rights of nature gives communities leverage, but alone these rights are not enough. We must also condemn the violent tactics of states and corporations seeking profit from lifegiving resources. The Rojava ecological experiment in Syria was recently threatened through US, Russian, and Turkish geopolitical maneuvering. Private police forces terrorize water protectors, guard thousands of acres of avocados in Michoacán, or commit murder as in the case of Berta Cáceres, who was killed while she tried to protect the waters of the Lenca people in Honduras. Since 2000, more than 1000 people have been murdered around the world while trying to protect their water, soil, forests, and food.⁷

In the United States and Canada, “man camps” built for drilling at the Bakkan oil fields and laying pipelines near indigenous nations contribute to the thousands of missing and murdered indigenous women. These dynamics create widespread individual and collective trauma. The public health community can stand up and protect the rights of nature, and also stand with people who are seeking to protect their health and their natural world.

EXPAND THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC HEALTH

Public health professionals have long advocated for human rights and for human resilience in the face of climate change. More is needed now. These times require a radical reorientation toward gratitude and respect for humanity’s connection to the earth. When we work for the health of the public, we must include all of the public: lakes, oceans, rivers, trees, plants, insects, animals, and humans.