Richard P. Hiskes. The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. x + 171 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-87395-6; $29.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-69614-2.

Reviewed by Kemi Fuentes George (Department of Government, the College of William and Mary)
Published on H-Human-Rights (December, 2009)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey)

Creating a Rights-Based Framework for Environmentalism

In The Human Right to a Green Future, Richard Hiskes argues that a clean environment, conceptualized throughout as comprising “clean air, water, and soil,” is a basic human right, and a necessary component of the notion of justice.  By so doing, Hiskes seeks to ground environmental claims and activism in a “more muscular political vocabulary” (p. 2), one which is more likely to persuade recalcitrant policymakers to take politically and economically costly steps to carry out green legislation.  The book specifically mentions climate change, but implies throughout that the conclusions should be universally applicable across local and global environmental issue areas.

Of course, linking the environment to international norms on human rights and justice is not straightforward, and Hiskes anticipates several theoretical challenges.  The specter of justice and rights invokes observations that an important element of these concepts is the presence of reciprocity between the aggrieved and the committer of aggravation.  In environmental issue-areas where the impacts of degradation are temporally distant, such a relationship is difficult to establish; contemporary societies lack the political will to pay for environmental management for processes still in the future.  

Hiskes begins his substantive argument in chapter 2 by locating human rights as emergent, social rights, rather than as Grotian natural rights.  In other words, human rights are socially constituted, and as such, change with society’s reconstitution, through the adoption of new norms, beliefs, and technological change.  At the same time, the core of human rights is the fact that they are, broadly stated, “protections from harms that threaten a person’s physical well-being, political equality, or sense of dignity” (p. 36).  This is an important conceptual turn for his argument.  Degraded water, soil, and air have clear impacts on people’s physical well-being.  At the same time, our knowledge about environmental degradation is progressing dynamically, and causal relationships are only recently becoming clear through development in scientific research methods.  By locating environmental issues in socially generated human rights, Hiskes argues that, though environmental rights have an element of permanence, situated in broader rights claims, they can also be expected to evolve with technology and knowledge.

Chapter 3 further addresses the issue of reciprocity by pointing out that, conceptually, a strict interpretation of “tit-for-tat” accountability as a requirement for justice could lead to patently unjust actions, citing the marginalization of mentally handicapped individuals.  As such, the inability of future generations to directly respond to contemporary populations does not preclude a more abstract notion of reciprocity, and hence does not preclude the operation of justice between current and future societies.  Hiskes argues that, as future populations will share our morals and beliefs, they should be considered as members of the same polity.  By acting to preserve the environmental rights of future community members, current societies will be in a better position to defend these emergent environmental rights, as they become more apparent.  Consequently, there is an element of “reflexive reciprocity,” in that actions taken for future generations have potential benefits for the present.

Hiskes admits throughout that the focus of a shared communitarian destiny as a basis for understanding emergent environmental rights is geographically and culturally limited.  As observed in chapter 4, the focus on the development of a shared identity between current and future community members can extend only as far as the boundaries of the sovereign state.  Although Hiskes argues for a temporally extended view of justice and rights in promoting environmentalism, he asserts that emergent environmental rights will have a parochial element, in that they will focus on the rights of citizens of the same state.  One immediate objection to this point is that environmental governance is often global in nature.

Chapter 5 returns to points made earlier in the book to address this objection.  First, Hiskes suggests that the implementation of environmental policy takes place at the local level, and as such, local commitment to environmental norms is essential in fostering governance.  The need for local action is not obviated by the actions of external actors.  Second, by forming a basis of a shared identity between contemporary and future citizens, environmental rights establishes legitimacy for resistance at the sub-state level to some of the harmful effects of globalization, including environmental harms. 

Finally, chapters 6 and 7 clarify the primary course of action desired by Hiskes: the inclusion of environmental rights in democratic constitutions is a “crucial first step in the guaranteeing of intergenerational environmental justice” (p. 133).  In addition, when environmental rights are procedural, such as rights enshrining public participation in environment-impacting policies, they reinforce broader democratic and political rights simultaneously.

Overall, the book argues strongly for creating a legal framework for environmentalism as a component of human rights.  If the implied program of environmental constitutionalism were adopted, it could provide a basis for legal activism within states, where environmentalists would have an increasingly robust set of international norms to demand accountability and action from governments.  Finally, although the book focuses on empowering local actors to demand environmental compliance, the eventual result will be the reification of universal environmental rights as more states link environmentalism to broadly held norms on human welfare.  For environmental studies scholars, advocates, and activists, this legalist framework provides a basis for generating political will at the local level for green policy.

Nevertheless, there are weaknesses in the book.  Hiskes indicates that becoming aware of a shared destiny and morality with future community members is an important conceptual tool in generating the political will to preserve environmental rights, but comes uncomfortably close to tautological reasoning when arguing that “environmental human rights ... [raise] the consciousness of each community to its obligations to the future” (pp. 62).  In addition, the arguments could have been more effectively organized.  The latter part of chapter 5 revisits the idea that environmental rights are properly situated within broader human rights norms, such as self-determination and autonomy, which could have been placed in earlier chapters to clarify why we should consider a clean environment as part of the human rights discourse.

More problematic is the apparent conflation of several potential environmental issues into one concept, the aforementioned “clean air, water, and soil.”  What makes environmental governance so difficult, particularly in developing countries, is not a lack of commitment to environmental goods, but rather competing visions of how to balance between these goods.  For example, the construction of dams may provide clean drinking water to rural populations, but at the cost of land conversion.  Linking environmental rights to human rights may lead to governance issues when different sectors of local populations have radically different ideas about the appropriate use of resources.  It would have been useful to have more discussion about how serious the issue of competing environmental rights claims could be to the legalist framework presented in the book, and how to reconcile rights claims with the various conservationist, preservationist, and utilitarian views of natural resources.

Finally, for international relations scholars, a major challenge to global environmental governance is the difficulty of delinking domestic environmental politics from the international arena.  The governance of acid rain was complicated because some states initially bore no internal costs for sulfur emissions.  Common pool resources are difficult to manage because of variations in the costs of resource depletion.  In addition, some areas in Russia, Canada, and the United States may realize net benefits from global climate change.  Overall, these point to the fact that policies taken at the local level, which lead to increased welfare and rights protection locally, may still contribute to global environmental degradation.

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Citation: Kemi Fuentes George. Review of Hiskes, Richard P., The Human Right to a Green Future: Environmental Rights and Intergenerational Justice. H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews. December, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25288

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