Rights-based arguments such as those used to fight the tobacco industry could be a powerful tool — including the rights of future generations to a healthy environment
If so, then our current system seems perfectly designed to push us beyond planetary boundaries in a variety of Earth systems, while creating widespread and worsening inequality.For the past few weeks, I have been exploring the underlying core values that drive many of our systems, institutions and choices.
All well and good, but how do we bring about these massive and rapid value shifts? How do we, as the late Will Steffen put it, reach social tipping points before we reach ecological ones?I spent a chunk of my time in the early 1980s in the fight against the tobacco industry. The social tipping point for smoking came when smoking came to be seen as an abuse of the rights of non-smokers. So using rights-based arguments could be powerful.
Beyond that, we need to consider the right of nature and of other species to exist. A number of countries around the world have recognized land and water systems as persons . After all, if corporations can be considered persons, why not the much more obviously alive ecosystems? But when we deplete a resource, poison an ecosystem or create long-term change in vital Earth systems, we are acting in an unjust manner towards other people and places, future generations and other species.
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