Newsgroups: talk.environment

Brian Yoder writes:
>The fact is that people are morally entitled to control their lives and the
>product of their work and to trade and coorperate VOLUNTARILY with one another.
>This is the case regardless of how severely the government may trample on such
>rights...they are still rights.

The fact is that future generations of humans are as morally entitled to a 
biologically rich planet and a healthy environment as we are. That alone 
places constraints on market mechanisms since future generations are not 
represented in present markets. Protection of their rights is a clearly 
legitimate -- indeed, *mandatory* -- role of government. Nor is this in any
way inconsistent with the views of the Founding Fathers, though of course
they could not have forseen that there would come a time when one generation
could so materially degrade the prospects for all subsequent generations.

A natural extension of the rights of posterity occurs as the ethical time 
scale moves from social time (centuries) to ecological and evolutionary 
time (millennia). In this extension -- called *ecocentrism* -- the biosphere
itself acquires "rights" or, equivalently, we acquire moral obligations to
ensure its continued healthy functioning. These obligations place the
ultimate constraint on human civilization, one which ensures that not only
do *we* have a "right to life", but also all future humanity has a "right
to life" -- and a right to a world which can support life as well as it
can for us. That in turn requires that all biological diversity have a
"right to life" -- not an *individual* right, but a collective right. 
That collective "right to life" of all species is more fundamental than
the individual "right to life" of humans, for the simple reason that the
latter could not exist without the former: human life depends on the
functioning of the biosphere.

Talk of "rights" always sets off fundamentalists like Yoder, who will
immediately (and with almost no individual variation) tell you exactly
which rights "really" exist and which don't. Hence it is better to speak
in terms of moral obligations or responsibilities than "rights". To say
that the biosphere has a "right" to continued healthy ecological and
evolutionary functioning is to say that *we* have a moral obligation not
to prevent it from doing so, and indeed to restore its opportunities --
to restore ecosystems -- enough to ensure this health.

These "rights" arise not from the mystical aprioristic pseudologic of
_Atlas Shrugged_ and other great works of metaphysics, but from the
biological requirements of the continued functioning of ecosystems, and
the fact that humanity has always depended on that functioning, and
that we have no right to take it away from our descendents -- not even 
if we knew that they could survive without it, which we certainly don't 
know. 

Yoder seems to think that what is legitimate for a government arises
from rights and ethics. That is the one idea I agree with -- only his
list of rights is *not* based on the requirements of life in the biological
sense, only on protecting the consumption of the current generation. 

That is not the reading of Jefferson's "right to life" which is informed
with what biology has learned about the ecological basis of life. 
Jefferson was an avid naturalist. If he were alive today, I'm sure he'd
be an ecocentric.

------------
Alan McGowen

"By the faces we show each other and to the world... we force the spring."
-- Bill Clinton