Deep Ecology in Practice

Earlier this month, Anne Barbeau Gardiner wrote in her article “A Lesson in Deep Ecology”:

Deep ecologists reject anthropocentrism, according to which human beings have irreducible value because they are made in the image of God; instead they embrace ecocentrism, according to which “an endangered plant species . . . has a direct claim to moral attention” and “the culling of an overabundant mammalian species in the same ecosystem may not only be morally justifiable, but obligatory to the extent that it would serve the integrity of the biotic community.” That “overabundant” species might well be us, for deep ecologists go beyond animal advocacy and hope to resolve conflicts between man and animal with “no special consideration to the interests and lives of rational, sentient, verbal Homo sapiens.”

For those of us who were skeptical that such a theory could be taken seriously and put into practice, Ecuador has given us a concrete example. This Sunday, the country will vote on a constitutional referendum which would grant rights to nature. Here’s an excerpt from the proposal:

Persons and people have the fundamental rights guaranteed in this Constitution and in the international human rights instruments. Nature is subject to those rights given by this Constitution and Law . . . Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms.* The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution. [*The word “organisms” means government bodies and courts.]

Astonishingly, the L.A. Times can’t decide whether giving rights to plants might be problematic:

In some ways, this makes sense for a country whose cultural identity is almost indistinguishable from its regional geography—the Galapagos, the Amazon, the Sierra. How this new area of constitutional law will work, however, is another question. We aren’t ready to endorse such a step at home, or even abroad. But it’s intriguing. We’ll be watching Ecuador’s example.

(via Wesley Smith )