Disrobing Rights: The Privilege of Being Human in the Rights of Nature Discourse

 
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The innate power of humans—the only viable adjudicator and enforcer of rights—is one of the major issues affecting Rights of Nature. This piece examines the layers of power that are involved with human-nature relations and how they can undermine the non-anthropocentric bearings of Rights of Nature. Protecting Nature for humans, as an object of rights, can circumvent the issue of who can represent it. However, it is unlikely that this mechanism is sufficient to trump what Tabios Hillebrecht terms the human “survival compulsion,” which is triggered when powerful forms of Nature stands to threaten the rights of humans.

DOI: doi.org/10.5282/rcc/8210