ABSTRACT
In his seminal article on ‘The Search for Environmental Rights’ Joseph Sax argued that there is no right to an untouched environment. And this is fortunately true, given that there is very little untouched environment in the world. This paper will place the discussion of rights to natural resources within their larger context, asking what it means to make a claim to our environment given the extent of human interaction with the natural world.
Drawing on Raymond Williams’ point that ‘a considerable part of what we call natural landscape … is the product of human design, of human labour’ (Williams 1997, 78) and work on the concept of the Capitalocene, this chapter will explore the implications of this for environmental rights. This does not mean that environmental rights are impossible or implausible, however it does mean that doing so is more complicated than we may presume. The role of qualifiers such as ‘safe’ and ‘adequate’ in the definition of environmental rights, as seen in the work of scholars such as Tim Hayward and Joseph Sax, must be developed and linked to a historical awareness of how environmental resources have been shaped by human activity. Looking at the extent of human interaction with the ‘natural’ world may complicate our understanding of rights to these resources, but it also shows how important rights to resources are.
