Should Rivers Have Rights? A Growing Movement Says It’s Time
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
> Western legal systems and governments traditionally viewed water and water rights as property, leading to overuse and contamination
That’s exactly the opposite of what is true. At least English law has never treated water as property. In England, and most of the east and midwest of the US, riperian doctrines apply to water. (I’m going to leave out the west coast, which has a nutso way of doing things.)
Common law riperian doctrine was strict: upstream property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land because downstream property owners have a right to unimpaired water quality. If we still did this, our rivers would be very clean! During the industrial revolution, the riperian doctrines were made looserc weakening the rights of downstream property owners.
The problem is that we don’t treat water like property. We can pollute it freely because nobody can sue us for it. I live on a river, and we can’t swim after a heavy rain because of all the crap washed into the river from upstream farms. If I had property rights in the water, I could sue those farmers, and the price of food would rise to reflect the externalities of farming. But we treat water as a commons, where no individual has enforceable property rights.
But when it comes to the environment, there are no property rights. Just loosey-goosey balancing of everyone’s needs to access the commons. And it leads to results exactly the opposite of what you conjecture: when it comes to water, courts and policymakers keep siding with farmers over bigger and more well funded industries/landowners. Here in Maryland, crabbing/farming has huge influence on environmental policy, despite making up a tiny fraction of the economy (just 2%).
Now given the historical context it sounds like you dont actually have a right to sue for water contamination. If you were suddenly granted this right it would constitute an unearned reward as the existing property doesnt contain those rights. So if this were to change I think it would make sense that you pay for this new right and thereby the price of food would decrease.
Finally I would agree that it is "loosey-goosey" the way the commons is today. However this is because there is now no concept of the public good because the world has entered zero sum dynamics. Peter Thiel explains this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkhfm6CYjE&feature=youtu.be...
Just for interest, could you elaborate? How does the West Coast (of the US, I assume you mean) do things?
A lot of water rights stuff was hashed out in Fresno County, which has a rich and interesting history.
I'd say that's abuse stemming from treating water as property.
This is a thought-provoking argument. But if you had property rights, could you not also restrict access to the river so that no one else could swim on it? And what if you don't care to swim in your river but are fine with accepting upstream pollution in exchange for payment from the polluters? What if a big agro-conglomerate simply buys the river?
It seems to me that key to the traditional riperian doctrine you cite is not property rights so much as the legal regulation:
> property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land
If water quality must be maintained, what does it matter whether it is individual property owners or the EPA taking up the cause? If we can imagine a future where riperian doctrines could be retightened to strengthen the rights of downstream property owners, why not imagine one where a properly managed and funded state or federal agency takes responsibility?
Why bother? Existing property law should be enough. If you poison water on my property, you pay me to make things right.
There’s no need for any government involvement besides civil courts, and investigative bodies (FBI, local detectives, etc).
In practice these property owners don’t really believe in private property. They think they can just dump contaminants onto other people’s property because containment is inconvenient.
It’s not a consistent moral position and their time is coming. There will be a reckoning and they will (financially) pay for their crimes. The arc of the law is long but bends towards justice.
Don’t get me started on the upcoming resolution of Native American and chattel slave property rights, which are as yet largely unadjudicated. Most (not all) property in this country was illegally seized, and he courts have yet to rule on the true ownership of most of those plots.
Because, as you can see, the EPA is subject to the whims of politics and will wax and wane in effectiveness. Property rights, however, will be consistently effective.
> Under the riparian principle, all landowners whose properties adjoin a body of water have the right to make reasonable use of it as it flows through or over their properties. If there is not enough water to satisfy all users, allotments are generally fixed in proportion to frontage on the water source. These rights cannot be sold or transferred other than with the adjoining land and only in reasonable quantities associated with that land. The water cannot be transferred out of the watershed without due consideration as to the rights of the downstream riparian landowners.
There is nothing to suggest that with treating water like property we wouldn't also end up at the same kind of tradeoffs, pollution legal limits or "allowances" where some ill defined external influence infringes on your similarly ill defined property rights.
Don't get caught up on the word "river," which is just a specific example. The general case is "ecosystem."
The corporate entity only "has rights" because it is a collection of people, and those people have rights.
Ecosystems aren't collections of people.
Is the implication here that "only people have rights," therefore ecosystems shouldn't? Correct me if mistaken. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that ecosystems have rights because corporations do.
This is indeed the status quo, but it's hardly immutable. Consider that 200 years ago neither women nor slaves were considered legal persons. Restating the status quo isn't an argument in its favor.
Rivers, of course, are not people nor are they composed of people. Nor are ecosystems. People might be affected by, for example, what happens to a river. All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
Isn't that definition exactly the problem? An ecologist would disagree of course, but how curious that every other species is considered part of the ecosystem, but we are not! We're subject to all the same ecological laws.
The humanity vs. nature separateness is of course entirely invented. But it's built into our very language: consider the other-ing effect of the term "environment" for instance.
> All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
You have it flipped around. The legal wrangling is almost entirely on the part of polluters seeking to avoid accountability (to great success, I might add). It helps that the 'environmental regulations' are written by the polluting industries themselves.
They use poorly characterized mass flows through the environment (there's that word again) and pollution etiologies (often "poorly characterized" because the company covered up its toxicity research, eg PCBs) like a cryptocurrency tumbler, laundering away their own liability for poisoning their neighbors. It's unconscionable.
is that a generic legal principle?
Why not? We restrict the liability of people, just because they're 'acting together' (a corp). To make that trade off fair, it seems like we should limit their 'rights' together as well. Corporations are sort of fundamentally unfair as they exist in the US, because they get almost all of the rights a real person does, but they have almost none of the responsibilities or liabilities a real person does.
Either [a] corporations should be required to be responsible for their actions (eliminate all limited liability, leadership and shareholders should become personally liable for most actions of the corporation they lead/own), or [b] corporations should loose a lot of their rights as a tradeoff for the reduced responsibilities and liabilities (like the ability for a corporation to have 'free speech').
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age
The idea that the Congo and the Amazon were once the same river before the Atlantic and the Andes existed is one of my favourites for a bit of geological sensawunda.
If there's a bidding process already in place, the Chilean government can charge companies the bid value annually as a public natural resource rent, and place the tax revenues in a permanent fund for conversation efforts. Instead of calling a river a legal person, a formal government charted corporation can be created for the river to distribute revenues from taxes on water right holders in a pro-social manner. This would be somewhat similar to 'Cap and Dividend' proposal for climate change.
https://www.linktv.org/shows/thomas-linzey-earth-at-risk-201...
There is already the possibility to create environmental protection non-profits for a specific area. In France, and other countries, it gives you the right to participate in lawsuit and even collect reparation for ecological prejudice (https://www.euractiv.com/section/climate-environment/news/er.... You can't however sue on behalf of the river's endangered interests. Giving legal personnality doesn't necessarily change the law as the article implies but change the way the law works.
Our concept was to add 'economic personnality'. Natural resources such as a river would have a cryptoasset account collectively managed by donors. "Gardeners" are local people hired by this collective to execute maintenance tasks, or lawsuits, while this board of donors oversee the management of the founds. Compared to a local non-profit, you gain easy internationalisation of donors and more transparency on funds allocation, potentially avoiding corruption.
The key is in the governance rules. As pointed in the article, it is extremely difficult to represent fairly and combine populations' interests and environment protection at the local, national and worldwide levels.
A visual demo can be seen here http://forest.lesusineslouise.com/
That's just an inefficient, roundabout way to manage a environmental legal defense team (will lawyers accept crypto-Monopoly money?). But such legal defenses are actually quite ineffective (by design!) at preventing ecological harm, even when they win the lawsuit.[1]
[1] https://www.linktv.org/shows/thomas-linzey-earth-at-risk-201...
The approach taken in recent years consist in creating or empowering an entity to represent of those interests. The more legitimate and the more economically robust is this entity, the more difficult it will be to act against its interests.
It is imperfect, but I think that this approach should be explored when existing regulations consistently fail
[1] https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christop...
If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability? What happens if a river overflows and few people drown? Do we punish the river?
A question in the title aside, I love the advocacy embedded in the title. "A growing movement"? From what to what? 2 to 3 people? The article is trying to grow the movement, it isn't reporting on a growing movement.
The only way to give rivers rights is to give it personhood rights in the same vein as corporations. But that means that rivers become privately owned entities. Do we want rivers to be owned by shareholders?
Rivers, like animals, are natural resources. Nations and states are stewards of it.
I think that question is key to understanding what rights are and how they function in the constitution of a polity.
Animals, rivers, etc. don't interact with us in the way other humans do. There may be analogous aspects to that interaction, so we can recognize that we have a responsibility to keep rivers clean, but that's an obligation on our part, not a "right" that the river has.
No, because other animals don't have mental capacity to truly understand the consequences of their action.
That said, I've never really seen a consistent argument against _protecting_ prey animals from lions (and letting lions die out).
I'm not convinced that dying of starvation is better than a sudden death. The vehicle accidents harm humans as well as the deer. The hungry deer damage crops and gardens.
I think the overpopulation also causes the spread of parasites (ticks etc.) which carry disease.
A lion knows full well that it survives another month when it kills a wildebeest and that it can feed it cubs. What more is there to "truly" understand?
A lion is not, to the best of our understanding, capable of understanding that killing another animal will cause grief to that other animal's family. If that other animal's family is even capable of understanding and/or grieving their death. And then we'd have to prove the killing was done with malicious intent, because just merely being responsible for someone's death, even as a human, is not immediately a criminal offense.
But it's a silly argument anyway because humans are often not prosecuted for the death of non-human animals, especially when that non-human animal is killed for food. So the idea that we would prosecute a lion for killing and eating an antelope is laughable when we don't prosecute a farmer for killing a cow for food.
Alternatively, prey animals would have to have the right to birth control, whereas predators would require a food program. Both would need to be provided by humans, of course, which would inevitably lead to an animal welfare state.
You might begin your research into this subject with reading about the reintroduction of wolves into various locations where they had been eliminated. The prey populations always fare better when there are predators around them. Without the pressure of predators to balance the population, deer and beaver and other prey animals tend to over-populate, which results in damage to the environment (over-grazing) and then eventually starvation of the prey animals.
The deer are either going to be killed by a wolf, killed by a human, or killed by disease and starvation. At least the first two options don't also cause extensive damage to the environment before they happen.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...
And your example of prosecuting a lion is unfortunately already reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(elephant)
Saying a being is a "natural resource" is just despicable. Someone else could say that with equal ease about your family. Would you like that?
Animals are fundamentally incapable of grasping the concepts of rights and would not respect them. Applying human standards to them is fundamentally anthropomorphic chauvinism and absurd hubris.
Under human standards we should start hunting or capturing more male lions because they would happily commit infanticide to make lionesses reproductively available. Naked mole rats are incestuous pedophiles. It is important to remember that nature does not care about you and cannot care about you.
Second, as I have shown earlier humans already do "prosecute" animals for such behaviour. So why would argue that "absurd hubris" should be applied in these cases?
Third, my point was not to start "prosecuting" other animals, but that humans do not follow their own standards.
Mockery or not, it happened and still happens. Only two years ago in Cincinnati. That was technically not "punishment" but the result was the same.
My main point is not whether or to prosecute other animals, but that humans live double standards.