The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice

Subjects:

Environmental Law

Contents:

1. Environmental human rights and intergenerational justice

2. Emergent human rights, identity, harms and duties

3. Reflexive reciprocity and intergenerational environmental justice

4. Cosmopolitan ethics, communal reciprocity, and global environmentalism

5. Toward a global consensus on environmental human rights

6. Human rights as inheritance: instituting intergenerational environmental justice

7. Conclusion: environmental justice and the emergent future of human rights.

This book presents an argument for environmental human rights as the basis of intergenerational environmental justice. It argues that the rights to clean air, water, and soil should be seen as the environmental human rights of both present and future generations.

It presents several new conceptualizations central to the development of theories of both human rights and justice, including emergent human rights, reflexive reciprocity as the foundation of justice, and a communitarian foundation for human rights that both protects the rights of future generations and makes possible an international consensus on human rights, beginning with environmental human rights. In the process of making the case for environmental human rights, the book surveys and contributes to the entire fields of human rights theory and environmental justice.

• A new approach to human rights in general: emergent human rights
• A new theory of environmental justice across generations
• A new idea of reciprocity called ‘reflexive reciprocity’