ABSTRACT
Human rights are often thought of as such things as the right to a fair trial or the right to not have one's property confiscated by government without due process of law. Environmental problems are rarely understood to create human rights violations, although recently there has been increasing interest in legal environmental literature on human rights issues. Many of the members of the Global Ecological Integrity Group (GEIG) have worked on those topics, from the standpoint of human ‘ecological rights’ in general (see, for example, Taylor, this volume), to the right to water (Dellapenna, this volume), to the right to health in relation to climate change (McMichael, 2000; Westra, 2007), as well as Westra viewing violations of the right to a safe environment as criminal in nature (Westra, 2004). Without doubt, the destruction of global ecological integrity, which has been a major focus of GEIG, is a fundamental threat to human dignity, which, as we shall see, is the foundational concern of human rights theory. Yet much of the environmental literature that raises rights questions has been devoted to whether non-human animals and plants have rights, rather than expressly developing the bases for seeing harmful environmental behaviour as triggering human rights violations.
