How radical has the U.N. become? This radical. Volker Türk, the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights, stated in a recent speech at Oxford University that nature rights are equivalent to human rights.
First, he briefly focused on our obligations as humans to treat the environment responsibly.
From the Scoop World transcript:
We have a responsibility to treat our planet with respect; to protect its glaciers and forests; to support the diversity of species on land and in the sea; to keep our rivers and lakes clean; to preserve nature, including ourselves.
No argument. That is a core principle of human exceptionalism.
But then, Türk denies that this responsibility flows from our exceptionalism, but rather, claims that our understanding of human uniqueness causes environmental problems:
The widespread misconception that nature is a hierarchy, with homo sapiens at its apex, is at the root of the planetary crises wreaking havoc across our world.
Türk complains about real contemporary environmental challenges — like plastics polluting the oceans — but says little of the tremendous strides made in recent decades to establish proper environmental standards, clean up pollution, and create effective remediation standards. And he mounts the usual attacks against villainous corporations — without once mentioning the incredible environmental depredation in countries such as China, where the air is filled with coal soot, not to mention the egregious human rights abuses and genocide committed by the Chinese Communist Party and by other tyrannies of the world.
And he complains about the toll caused by heat without mentioning that far more people die each year from cold.
Türk makes the commonsense assertion that human rights lead to a better, more peaceful world. But he then claims that granting rights to nature is an issue of human rights:
What if humanity’s unity with nature determined our politics?
And what if we recognized that nature has rights, too?
The rights of certain species are already widely recognized in many legal systems; cruel treatment is illegal while there are restrictions on animal testing and laws to protect wildlife.
What about an ocean? A glacier? A tree?
Remember the outcry when the Sycamore Gap tree was cut down?
Two men were recently found guilty of this crime. At some level, people accept that a tree has a right to exist and grow. So too, nature as a whole.
And authorities around the world increasingly recognise aspects of the rights of nature – even at the international level.
The Kunming-Montreal agreement on biodiversity, adopted in 2022, acknowledges that the rights of nature are vital to successful implementation.
Türk then swoons over indigenous cultures without noting that such societies are non-industrial and their ways of living on the land could not support the 8 billion people who inhabit this planet. Talk about an emerging advocacy cliché.
Laughably, he pushes for increased use of AI, without noting that this would require exponential increases in power generation, which cannot be accomplished with renewables like wind or solar power. He demands reparations from corporations for climate change and a massive tax on billionaires, but nothing from socialist societies. It’s so much powdered sugar.
Türk is all wet. Granting rights to nature would destroy all that he claims to want to accomplish for suffering humanity. Freedom requires prosperity. Instituting sterling environmental practices depends on economic thriving. Eradicating destitution in the world will necessitate responsible but vigorous exploitation of natural resources — the very practices that nature rights radicals seek to impede.
Read the whole speech. It illustrates the vacuousness of radical environmentalism mixed with misplaced finger-pointing about human rights abuses. No wonder so many increasingly think of the U.N. as a pathetic joke.