Note: This is one of three sections on Rights Theory. They have in common my belief that Rights theory is usually the weakest way to support any issue. Rights is a weak justifier for three reasons:
o It is easily countered logically with what I call the DMV Defense, "That's not a right, that's a privilege."
o Rights are tightly connected to prosperity because most rights must be materially supported by a community's prosperity -- Rights do not come cheaply, so they are a product of luxury thinking.
o The emotional power behind most rights appeals is guilt thinking. Guilt is a strong emotion, so it leads to some really wacky choices when those choices are looked at from a cost/benefit point of view. Which means the choice is very expensive for the community to support, but the expense is often not noticed by the rights enthusiast.
I see the dark side of Rights Theory being that it is often the Theory of Beggars.
Environmental rights has a long history. One could date it back to the first time a hunter gatherer tribe protested a farmer tribe's slash-and-burning a nice foraging area to grow crops. Time and circumstances have changed a lot since that prehistoric day, but the argument over the rightness of making manmade alterations to the land has always been with us.
These days key element in this controversy is the manmade part, and this manmade element has become more important. Let me give a contemporary example.
In the 1970's there were climate alarmists, just as there are in the 2010's, but there were two significant differences. The alarmists in the 1970's were warning about a coming Ice Age, and the world community was saying, "Ho-hum."
In the 2010's the alarmists are warning about global warming (ironically, many of them are those same 70's alarmists), and the world community is saying, "BRRRAK!! BRRRAK!! RED ALERT!!!" and in the process of spending trillions of dollars to fix the problem.
...Eh? What's the difference?
The difference is a single big word: anthropogenic, which means something manmade.
The Ice Age the 70's alarmists wrote about would be caused by Mother Nature, the global warming the 10's alarmists write about is caused by manmade activities.
If both are going to dramatically change life as we know it, why get excited about one, but not the other?
The answer is guilt. People are getting excited about global warming because it is manmade and that makes people feel guilty. Climate change is now one of the booming guilt industries of the early 21st century.
Why does it matter that guilt is powering this effort?
It matters because guilt is a powerful emotion, but one that is notorious for paying absolutely no attention to cost/benefit. People and communities are perfectly willing to do astoundingly nutty things to lose guilt. That may be acceptable on a personal level, but if we are talking about financing a world-wide trillion dollar effort... if it's not cost effective, it's an expensive blunder. If it's not cost effective, we are financing a scapegoat, not a solution.
We will be spending money on a perverse entertainment form, not on solving a science problem.
The moral of this story is that these days we need to be very careful in thinking about environmental issues. Over the last fifty years the environmental movement has been linking itself more and more tightly with the guilt emotion. This has transformed environmentalism into a guilt industry. This transformation has been very good in terms of bringing money and attention into the environment movement, but the dark side is that the money brought in has not been spent with cost/benefit in mind. This means the money has been spent for entertainment rather than for fixing real world problems.
... Not so good for the real world.
... And we are fooling ourselves, not Mother Nature.