14 DAY TRIAL // Given the growing number of environmental disasters taking place around the world, experts say that it would be a really good idea to certify the right of biological communities and ecosystems to be legally represented. These areas have value beyond being of use to humans.
At this point, we are used to think about such communities as being there simply to help us. As such, we regard them as having value only as property, and not in themselves. This view is very wrong, and it ultimately contributes to promoting disasters such as the 2010 BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
The event triggered a cascade of hundreds of lawsuits, that were filed by the government, state and federal agencies, and also by private individuals. But what environmental philosophers are looking to obtain is the right for, say, the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem to represent itself in a court of law.
According to the experts, these areas have the right to exist in the same way we do. The right to be represented fairly in a court of law stems from this right to exist. Just like it applies to us, it could apply to critically important ecosystems and habitats, that financial interests are now mercilessly exploiting.
By granting these important areas with this right, authorities would basically enable individuals, organizations or governmental agencies to represent nature as legal guardians and/or trustees.
One of the most significant implications of such a right would be that pollution would be recognized as an environmentally-damaging factor in a court of law, and not just in the minds of citizens.
“There is room in our legal system to expand the concept of guardianship,” believes the executive director of the Center for Earth Jurisprudence, Patricia Siemen.
“The inlets and the marshes, the beaches that are damaged, species of birds that are threatened – each one may have its own guardian, with a right to speak for the interests of that being, and the legal authority to speak for that being,” she adds, quoted by Wired.
Interestingly, Charles Darwin wrote in his book “The Descent of Man” that humankind has a tendency to increase its morality higher and higher, but only when it extends its attention and empathy to species that are below it in the evolutionary chain.
University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone said in 1972 that to deny the right for ecosystems and species to be represented legally constitutes the same mistake as denying foreigners, immigrants, women and children the same rights.
“Where natural rights would have the greatest influence in the context of oil and oil spills is before oil spills occur, when you’re trying to prevent damages from occurring,” adds the director of the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) Ocean Program, Kathryn Mengerink.