Recognizing the Human Right to a Healthy Environment
We live in a time of immense juxtaposition. Recently, on July 28, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted—by a count of 161 in favor, with 8 abstentions—that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right.
Building on the similar declaration by the United Nations Human Rights Council in October 2021 (, the UNGA has now reinforced the notion that the growing assaults on human health through environmental hazards are transgressions against the basic rights and freedoms of people. Efforts towards the construction of a human right to healthy planet, and even a planetary right to health signifying potential rights of nature, are growing both in real activity and demand.
More than nine million people die annually from toxic pollution, mostly in low and middle income, and sadly much of which is mitigatable.
But why are such declarations and efforts needed? Likely because of the current human-modified conditions of our planet. For example, more than 90% of the world’s population is not able to enjoy this alleged human right due to toxic pollution exposures alone. Or the fact that we are now believed to be exceeding several critical earth systems planetary boundaries, which could result in rapid deleterious changes rippling through the global ecosystem—an outcome many suggest, to varying degrees, is already transpiring today such that massive systemic ecological collapse and increased global suffering may be no more than a few decades away.
In fact, recent work comparing the ‘safe operating space’ of Earth systems boundaries and what might be considered ‘just’ boundaries found that in almost all measures both the safe and just boundaries are exceeded. In other words, across all major earth systems, environmental injustice is pervasive and pernicious, affecting aspects of everyday life for most humans on the planet. These realized impacts on human health and flourishing are environmental violence.
Environmental Violence: Defining a Global Crisis
Environmental violence is defined as direct and indirect harm experienced by humans due to excess toxic and non-toxic pollutants put into a local—and concurrently the global—ecosystem through human activities and processes. This definition specifies and centers excess human-produced pollution as a violent environmental health hazard. Pollution is in excess when human flourishing has been maximized and its production either does not meet or is not required to meet a human need and instead, on net, causes more externalized human suffering than it serves to prevent.
Using less and thus contributing less is not a sacrifice or a reduction in quality or quantity of life.
Importantly, humans always have and likely always will produce pollution as a byproduct of meeting our needs. This is the yet unresolved threshold determination of measuring environmental violence, at what point does human-produced pollution transitions from necessary to violent? At what threshold have basic human needs been met and optimized, and any excess contributes to environmental violence? Recent investigations by scholars like the ecological economist Dan O’Neill have pitched this as achieving ‘a good life for all’ within planetary boundaries.
To date, evidence indicates that no country has yet found a way to achieve a good life for all, or for its citizenry, while staying within its planetary boundaries. Even the countries that tend to score highest on the UNSDGs do not score well when you account for total resource consumption and corresponding externalized effects, what has been termed ‘ecologically unequal exchange’. In fact, rich countries rely on a large net appropriation of resources from the global South, where resource draining from the South is valued at over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices.
Global Inequality: The Unequal Burden of Environmental Violence
The reality is in many cases one person’s consumption coming at the loss of another’s well-being. This is not particularly new in human history, but what is new is the immense scale and impact of the toxic and non-toxic emissions tied to this process—and the dramatic inverse relationship between beneficiaries and victims of environmental violence.
And this type of violence is separate but intricately related to conflicts, protests, environmental defender attacks, and other forms of direct violence spurred by the inequality of risk: the environmental injustice.
Though many and important, the death toll from these forms of direct violence pale in comparison to those from environmental violence.
More than nine million people die annually from toxic pollution, mostly in low and middle income, and sadly much of which is mitigatable. And much more human mortality and suffering is resulting from anthropogenic climate change.
The Human Toll: Pollution, Mortality, and Climate Change
As John Paul Lederach put it so terribly right, “The numbing numbered fact is this: Climate Change may slowly be arriving. Climate Strange arrived long ago. This mix of global warming and humanly produced toxic pollution is not on the horizon. It’s our invisible presence, the loss of life we have been gloaming in for years.”
For the unknowing reader like me, gloaming is to witness the sky’s capacity to glow just before dusk; less commonly, to be present with the first hint of light just before dawn. The proposed question here being are we at the beginning of the new beginning necessary to save ourselves or our planet, or at the end of our rope.
There is much to be concerned about from environmental violence to be sure. There is no singular or easy or clearly viable arc to renewal. But there is empirical evidence to support hope in seemingly hopeless times.
Cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are the predominant mode of humanity’s action.
First, the idea that the humans most responsible for environmental violence through excessive consumption would, on average, be both healthier and happier using less and thus contributing less to environmental violence is a critical source of hope.
While the path to getting people to buy into self-actualization through low-material flow experiences and live out “sustainable life” is unclear, the empirical evidence is compelling that ALL people would be happier doing so no matter their current socioeconomic status.
It is particularly important that those most responsible, and who thus have the most power and available choices to affect their environmental violence contributions, would also be better off. Using less and thus contributing less is not a sacrifice or a reduction in quality or quantity of life – it would enhance it.
This results in the choice of using less to be the most “correct” answer whether applying a normative framework oriented toward the collective good or a self-interested framework focused on maximizing individual utility. In other words, what is good for the self is good for the whole – and in this case for the planet too.
Sustainable Living: A Path Toward Collective and Individual Flourishing
The second source of hope is the possibility of regenerative production. Whether through the application of regenerative agriculture that promotes food production and ecosystem vitality toward an agriculture of flourishing, as or through myriad other regenerative production schemes that have been evaluated to date, regeneration offers the possibility of concurrently caring for human and planetary flourishing.
Producing toward meeting human needs and flourishing is thus not inherently antithetical to ecosystem flourishing, and is also not antithetical to technological innovation as some of the most productive regenerative systems thoroughly integrate artificial intelligence, machine learning, and unmanned automated vehicles in their production process.
This does not mean that lifeways will not have to be adjusted and calibrated to new products, activities, and ecologies. Much change is needed to harness the power and value of regenerative praxis. And pursuing regenerative production does not inherently result in equality and equity, and therefore is not a standalone solution. But it does offer alternative means by which human flourishing and planetary functioning can be repaired and sustained despite the broad reach and impact of environmental violence.
Regenerative Practices: A Bridge Between Human and Planetary Well-Being
The third is that cooperation, coordination, and collaboration are the predominant mode of humanity’s action. For more than two million years, the genus Homo (human ancestors) has been navigating the ecological, social, and structural challenges of living on and with the Earth and its other inhabitants by working, thinking, and acting together, constructing niches and shaping worlds and we are in turn shaped by them.
As noted earlier, this distinctive dynamic has led to both the best and the worst of outcomes. But yet it remains as humans’ first and best capacity for reshaping our economies, ecologies, and societies. Harnessing it, as suggested by many in this volume and as we are suggesting here, is not a pipe dream, but it is also not easy. Recognizing humanity’s deep bodily and cognitive commitment to working together is a first step and thinking, together, on how to harness and deploy it is the true challenge.
Environmental violence is the most pernicious detractor of human functioning and flourishing, and even our survival, today. Understanding its many contours, pathways, production, and penances on the human and our planet is essential to not only planetary health but justice. The human right to a clean, safe, and healthy environment has been declared.
The evidence says all people would be healthier, happier, and more fulfilled in the pursuit and actualization of the lifeways that get us to holistic sustainability—that is, social, ecological, and economic sustainability. In other words, the legal and social and environmental scientific basis exists to actuate a path away from environmental violence and towards equitable human flourishing. This is essential but on its own insufficient; evidence is not action. But at least all humans are evidentially and truly incentivized to act. That is a powerful starting point.
