ABSTRACT
Living on the eastern seaboard of a vast and sparsely populated continent replete with natural resources, it is unlikely that the draughtsmen of the Constitution of the United States of America gave any thought to environmental constraints which might prejudice the enjoyment of the rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. It was the familiar Old-World threats–corrupt judges, dogmatic clerics, autocratic kings–to what are now labelled human rights which they were most anxious to address. When, nearly two hundred years later, the United Nations declared
Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. 1
the cited constraints on the enjoyment of this right were social constructs rather than physical factors. Given the proximity in time of the Holocaust and the experience of many atrocities committed during the Second World War, the absence of any reference to ecological constraints in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is hardly surprising. It was only with the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s that the inalienability of the right to reproduce was questioned:To couple the concept of the freedom to breed with the belief that everyone born has equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of action. 2
