Here is a story on “nature rights” activism that, on first impression, leaves one bemused. But I think it has important implications. Activists tried to qualify a glacier for the Iceland presidential ballot. From the Columbia University Climate School’s newsletter, State of the Planet:
Efforts to protect glaciers from climate change are especially important in regions where glaciers are culturally important, like Iceland. This spring, Icelandic citizens took a new approach: nominating a glacier for president. The campaign did not earn the necessary number of signatures to place their candidate on the ballot, but members remain hopeful that the support gained can be channeled into other efforts to protect Iceland’s glaciers and ecosystems.
What’s this all about? “Personhood” for geological features:
While using legislation, court rulings and ballot measures to provide natural features with legal rights is not new, these so-called “Rights of Nature” campaigns have become more common in recent years. They seek to provide natural features like rivers, ecosystems and glaciers with legal “personhood” to make it easier to protect them from pollution and climate change. . . .
The campaign that sought to nominate Snæfellsjökull, an Icelandic glacier, for president was the first attempt within Iceland to establish Rights of Nature.
In other words, the “nature rights” movement isn’t “merely” about a right for rivers to flow freely (“river rights“) or to allow people to sue on behalf of mountains to prevent the mining of minerals, a strategy that has already prevented copper mining in Ecuador and Panama. Given the climate-change connection, it is far more ambitious. If nature has a right to (somehow) prevent climate change, no human enterprise or activity deemed to contribute to global warming will be safe from interference by courts or nature-rights commissions.
The Icelandic activists’ stunt failed to place Snæfellsjökull on the ballot, but it advanced the nature-rights movement in Iceland, which was the ultimate point:
Valckx and another campaign spokesperson, Cody Skahan, remained enthusiastic. “We’ve built a community around this movement, which is something we can be proud of,” said Valckx.
“We’re focusing on how to incorporate discussion of Rights of Nature and glacier retreat into the ongoing presidential race through questions submitted for public debates, media articles and use of our creative outlets,” said Skahan, adding, “we’re also hoping to pivot to a more general Rights of Nature focus, incorporating different Icelandic ecosystems.”
Note that Columbia’s Climate School — located in one of our most important universities — heartily approved of this effort, though the newsletter quotes an activist who wants more focused passage of nature-rights laws:
While Rights of Nature campaigns can be meaningful and powerful, experts on glacier activism like Mark Carey, a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Oregon, caution against campaigns that stop at awareness or performance. “Campaigns that focus on awareness for climate change and melting glaciers are outdated,” said Carey in an interview with GlacierHub. To move beyond awareness, he explained, the campaign should continue to work toward “legal and political actions that are formalized in binding ways to enact Rights of Nature,” which would serve as an “exciting” example if they can accomplish this.
So, we can laugh at the notion of a glacier president. (I envision some commenters writing that it would be an improvement over what we have.) But the nature-rights movement should not be dismissed or laughed off. Step by step, inch by inch, it is advancing (like a growing glacier) with way too little resistance.
It would be calamitous were it to succeed. Western civilization’s focus on the importance of humans would be corroded, free-market systems hobbled, our economies shackled into degrowth, and destitute places in the world forced to remain mired in poverty, unable to exploit their natural resources and earth’s bounties. China, which doesn’t allow rights for humans, will never grant rights to nature; a West that enacts nature-rights laws would be a gift to the CCP’s vision of world dominance.
The only way to prevent such an outcome is for most of us to take the nature-rights movement as seriously as its proponents do.