July 2004
Human Rights and Ecological Imperative
by Jim Swann
Jim Swann practiced architecture in Chicago as Swann and Weiskopf for 30 years before moving to Bellingham in 1992. He recently completed a book on human rights and the environment and offers educational projects on his Web site (http://www.jeneticjigsaw.com).
Part One
What follows is a digest from a larger essay, which evolved from a personal quest to enlarge and clarify our human rights and responsibilities. In it I attempted to weave an organic fabric beginning with the individual. I tried to include all of mens and womens basic interactions; those with one another, with their families and communities and with their mutually shared life support systems.
This search was prompted by my own observations as an architect with journeys through the slums and suburbs of today and through the not so equitable workings of our present democratic institutions. Wiser men and women than myself, whose writings I had come to admire and whose wisdom I borrowed, also prompted it. Here is a bit of this borrowed wisdom, then on with the digest.
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. As our case is new, so must we think and act anew
we must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Abraham Lincoln
The Individual Is Born Into a Continuum
The individual is born into a continuum of other individuals, of many cultures, of other biologic species and diverse ecosystems. These women and men are unique creations conceived by unique parents and born into unique environments of family, friends and place. The extent of their positive contributions to this continuum will be based on how well they are able to make use of their unique faculties. This, in turn, will depend on a working concept of rights, which perceives that optimizing the individuals potential optimizes societys chances for survival and success.
But the individual alone is an abstraction from the real world. The need is to clarify the whole of which the individual is only one part. I have tried to outline this as follows: the various acts of individuals I have termed exclusive rights, those of families mutual rights, those of businesses or government use rights, and those of all individuals collectively participating in their governments as shared, or civil rights. In every case I have tried to relate these to one another and to everyones mutually shared biosphere.
The individual requires an exclusive right to the exercise of his or her own physical and mental faculties. Couples require the right to procreate, to rear, nurture and educate their children and the responsibility to care for their elderly. All citizens require equal access to their shared life support systems and an equal right to the use of the natural and cultural resources thereof. All citizens require a shared right and responsibility to protect and enhance these aformentioned rights and to resolve infringements thereof.
Freed of tyrants, hereditary monarchs and religious theocrats, men and women find themselves in charge of their own fate. They are the state. As such they have an obligation to their fellow citizens and to their progeny, an obligation to formulate and administer equitable justice. This justice should be one that seeks to eliminate historic privilege; those laws written by the strong to protect and prolong their privileges. It must also be the kind of justice that perceives the realization of a sustainable society as perhaps the ultimate responsibility.
Function of Law
The function of law, then, should be to provide a framework within which each individual, each family and their children, every freely associating group of individuals and all individuals collectively as citizens can best realize their potential without detriment to others or their shared environment, earth.
The achievement of such a rule of law will not come easily. It calls for many restraints which, seen historically, appear intractable: population, consumption and destruction constraints, equal right of access to resources and representative democracy freed from special interests; one wherein the defining and adjudication of all rights is removed from partisan prerogatives.
While acknowledging our sun and its life-sustaining role in our lives we realize that we have no role to play in its life or death. We may not likewise have control over the visitation of some giant meteor or a devastating world plague. We can, however, exert some control over our own destiny as participants in our shared biosphere. How well we understand biosphere dynamics and begin to live in harmony with them is critical. This is what I have termed the ecological imperative.
What we do know is that spaceship earth, like our own man-made spaceships, is a closed system and our survival depends on whether we can develop what Kenneth Boulding states are symbiotic relationships of a closed cycle character with all other elements and populations of a world of ecological systems. There is no place to hide the garbage, nowhere to flee.
Redefinition of Ownership As a Verb
Central to all rights is the redefinition of ownership as a verb meaning the providing and receiving of complete services that protect and restore whatever eco damage they may do. Protecting the biosphere is a communal responsibility, an ongoing stewardship.
What has prompted this essay is the ongoing violation of others rights, unearned incomes, disservices and irresponsibility. At another level it is about crafting rights commensurate with the problems facing us. It is also about our dysfunctional ideologies, some inherited, some invented by special interests. It is about our expanding information base and concurrently degrading life support base.
It is about redefining those things that need to be socialized and those that should best stay privatized. It is about redefining wealth as a sustainable process and present economic growth as a non-sustainable one. It is about the search for new energy resources to replace fossil fuels or learning to live with less. Finally, it is about fear and longing with the hope that we can disenthrall ourselves to think and act anew.
This essay is not about any single violation of a comprehensive bill of human rights. It is not just about runaway population, resource destruction, externalized costs, extractive investments, human exploitation, and predatory capital or weapons proliferation. Nor is it only about compromised democracies, repressive theocracies or petty dictatorships.
And it is not just about the sum of these or other factors. It is about how all these factors forestall the realization of our rights, unfairly consume and destroy resources, and threaten our collective existence. It is also about the huge human energy potential, which would be freed by their elimination.
Interdependence of All Nations
Finally, it is not just about the United States. It is about the world and the interdependence of all nations. It is about the urgency of evolving a strong, democratic United Nations, one that understands the unjust disparities between countries and between citizens within each country, and is able to redress them. It is also about the need for a U.N., which sees the biosphere as a complex of dynamic events without national boundaries or private properties, therefore as a collective human habitat, requiring collective decisions regarding its use or abuse. It must be a United Nations based on comprehensive human rights and responsibilities with authority to protect and enhance them.
No panaceas are offered, nor are there any easy roads to follow. I am attempting to expand the concept of peoples rights and conversely their responsibilities, and to suggest some scenarios that might help towards their realization. I have said that democracies appear as our best hope because, like human rights at their core, they are dynamic, evolving from exclusion to inclusion. Other systems of government tend to be exclusive and static, thus inflexible and degrading to the human spirit. They limit and frustrate participation. At worse, they foster conflict. §
Next Month Part Two
Types of RightsExclusive, Mutual and Equal Use