ABSTRACT
Following the enormous intellectual activity directed towards environmental issues in recent years, it is possible to identify two distinct meanings of the of the term 'environmental rights'. First, it tends to be applied to a broad range of legal rights related to an individual's use of and access to various aspects of the physical world. The second conception of environmental rights is ecocentric rather than anthropocentric; they are not human rights but rights above all the right to a continued existence unthreatened by human activities attached to nonhuman species, to elements of the natural environment and to inanimate objects. This chapter examines critically the first conception. It pays attention to the atmosphere for two reasons. Firstly, the atmosphere can claim to be the definitive example of what economists refer to as a 'common property resource'. Secondly, a 'right to clean air' has prompted curiosity.
