An assumption that all creations have rights. A river has the right to remain unpoluted from the neglect or deliberate malice of its keepers. A tree has the right to remain free of contamination and degradation caused by neglect or deliberate disregard for its flourishing health. That does not mean that we can't dam up the river or cut down the tree. However, it means we should maintain responsibility for keeping the environment in a clean and healthy condition as we determine to manage these resources.
I'm sorry, but this makes no sense to me as a philosophy. The basic fallacy, as I see it, is that you are taking on the absolute power and right of determining what the "rights" of a river are and are not. A river has the right not to be polluted, but not the right not to be damned. On what possible basis do you make this distinction for the river, and give it no voice in what rights it wants to assert for itself?
If a river did have rights, I would think the right to run free and true to its nature would be one of its most basic rights. That is, the right not to be dammed for human convenience, and forced to live in slavery rather than freedom.
And what is pollution? Is human waste pollution? Fish, deer, bears defecate in water; why shouldn't humans?
It all seems so totally arbitrary that it makes no intellectual sense, at least to me. |
