The recent UN General Assembly’s historic recognition of the right to a healthy environment and the proliferation of rights of nature legislation and jurisprudence are not isolated developments. On the contrary, they are part of a broader interest in charting a new relationship with nature which is evident in many fields, from the sciences to the humanities and arts to culture and spirituality. 

I believe that this “ecological turn” poses one of the most potent challenges and offers some of the most promising responses to the shortcomings of human rights concepts and practice. If we are to fully embrace the potential of this paradigm shift, we would do well to follow the lead of the scientific fields that Richard Powers has eloquently called the “humbling sciences”—ecology, botany, ethology, mycology, microbiology, geology, chemistry, and other natural sciences—that are effectively blurring the categorical distinction between humans and non-humans, as well as challenging the anthropocentrism and human supremacism that has dominated fields like human rights. In so doing, the humbling sciences are joining the much older claims of Indigenous cultures that are based on the inseparability of humans and nature and are couched in a “grammar of animacy” that recognizes human and non-human life and agency alike.

Evidence of the ubiquity of the interrelationships that characterize the more than human world is everywhere. Equipped with sensors and A.I. technologies, scientists eavesdrop on conversations among whales, birds, bats, and mole rats in order to decipher their languages and attempt to talk back to them. Botanists like Suzanne Simmard cleverly catch the messages that trees send to each other through mycelial networks. Microbiologists are busy tracking the multitudes we contain – the microbes that inhabit our guts, skin, and scalp and that outnumber our “human” cells. Mycologists have embarked on a new global cartographic mission, the first one to map underground fungal networks. Other scientists are concocting ingenious devices to peer into other animals’ worldviews. 

The ecological turn postulates the deep entanglement between species, to the point of blurring the boundaries between individuals and between them and their surroundings. These are the “entangled lives” that mycologist Merlin Sheldrake has written about to capture the interpenetration between plants and fungi, or between the algae and fungi that make up lichens, or between human cells and the countless microbes that inhabit us. “We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes,” he concludes. “Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.”

If biology has become ecology, if individuals are ecosystems, where does that leave human rights, which arose to protect individual homo sapiens? What novelties and what surprises would it bring to embed human rights in the more than human world? This is the project that I have proposed calling more than human rights (MOTH). Starting with this blog, OGR will be publishing periodic contributions to this collective endeavor, which is curated by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic at NYU School of Law. 

For now, suffice it to note that the ecological turn would require concepts and metaphors different from those that have dominated human rights. When the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen stated that “the end in view of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,” it affirmed a double cleavage: between self-contained (human) individuals and between human nature and the rest of nature. (Of course, the distinction between the rights of men and women was a third cleavage that was present at the time of the Declaration but has since been largely overcome in human rights law, if not in practice).

Since then, the concepts and metaphors of the human rights field have not come from biology, let alone ecology. The language of rights has been that of liberal philosophy and jurisprudence and of the social sciences, where rights are seen as individual entitlements that protect specifically human interests against abuses by governments and other individuals. 

The second line of recent studies and discussions that should lead us to reconsider the conceptual foundations of the rights project has to do with the capabilities that have been used to support a hierarchical order placing humans above non-humans. From the Greeks to the present day, through the Cartesian view of animals as machines incapable of thinking or feeling, the emphasis of anthropocentric thinking has been on the differences and hierarchy between humans and non-humans. Capabilities such as intelligence, learning, consciousness, sentience, and language have been invariably defined in terms of their human manifestations and used to reaffirm a hierarchy of life with homo sapiens at the top, followed by primates, then by other animals, and down to plants, fungi, and the rest of nature. As this great chain of being descends, the moral consideration given to occupants of each echelon steadily decreases. 

Traditionally, the human rights project has implicitly or explicitly held tight to this great chain of being and the human supremacism that it entails, as philosopher Will Kymlicka has convincingly argued. In recent decades, animal rights theorists like Kymlicka and Martha Nussbaum have mounted a powerful challenge against this view and have sought to conceive of “human rights without human supremacism.” 

The ecological turn in Western science and other fields provides a wealth of evidence in support of this move. The aforementioned lines of inquiry on animal communication and perceptual worlds have questioned humanity’s monopoly over intelligence, consciousness, language, and other capabilities. However, other fields of knowledge go beyond “higher” animals. Botanists, mycologists, and other scientists are busy documenting how organisms such as plants, fungi, and slime molds solve problems, learn, or communicate with each other and the external world. Whether those skills qualify as intelligence depends on how one defines intelligence, a category that is now being actively debated.

As Sheldrake asks, “biological realities are never black-and-white. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world—our investigative tools—be so?” In the same vein, why should the concepts that we use to draw the line between rights-holders and the rest of nature follow the binaries that separate humans and animals, higher animals and other animals, and animals and the rest of nature? 

At first glance, human rights have nothing to do with science fiction. Reports, campaigns, and litigation deal with the very real world of wars and authoritarianism, social inequalities, polarizing technologies, ecological collapse, and the other existential challenges to human rights. Hence fiction, and even more so, science fiction, are often seen as tastes outside the profession, relegated to readings or movies for evenings or weekends. 

I counted myself among those indifferent to science fiction. That was before I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future. Robinson’s novel, published in 2020, about the future of climate change has received the attention it deserves: some have called it the most important book of 2021 while many others have debated the plethora of scenarios, risks, and solutions it projects about global warming over the next three decades. 

To add to the acclaim, I believe the novel to be indispensable for imagining the future of human rights on an incandescent planet, which is also why I don’t want to spoil its reading with a hasty synthesis. (A good review can be found here). My intention is to analyze why this kind of science fiction resonates with a wide audience, and how it can enrich human rights thinking and practice.

In a recent interview, Robinson gives a valuable clue. What science fiction does is deploy double vision? “Think of the glasses that you put on at a 3D movie," Robinson says. "Those special glasses have one lens showing you one thing and the other lens showing you another thing, slightly different. And your brain puts together a 3D view from these. So one lens of science fiction is a real attempt to imagine a possible future. The other lens is a metaphor for the way things are right now.”

The book deploys this double gaze skillfully. It begins almost in the present, with the poignant scenes of an extreme humid heat wave that claims 20 million lives in India in 2025. And it closes near 2050, when humanity finally succeeds in reducing emissions of Earth-warming gases. The chapters go back and forth between the short and medium term, in step with the lurches that humans and the planet take during this period. Fires, droughts, hurricanes, mass migrations, melting of the poles and economic crises alternate with unprecedented actions against global warming, from a new world currency that rewards emission reductions to novel environmental movements, both peaceful and violent, to large ecological corridors that preserve endangered species, and successful and unsuccessful geoengineering projects. 

This is where the usefulness of science fiction lies. In the field of human rights, I believe it makes three fundamental contributions. The first is to serve as an antidote to pessimism and despair. When the future seems more uncertain than ever—that of democracy, peace, and the planet itself—we need narratives that help us imagine and anticipate other possible scenarios. When the challenges to human rights multiply and it is difficult to see ways out of the present crossroads, we need to think of ways out anchored in a rich reading of the present and a creative and credible vision of the possibilities of the future.

A second benefit of this type of science fiction is to revitalize the utopian vocation of human rights. Against the undeniable evidence of the many human inequalities, human rights propose a moral perspective where all people are equal in dignity and rights. Rights, as Amartya Sen has written, consist fundamentally of this moral vision, defending them means swimming against the current of facts. Hence they have, by definition, a counterfactual, even utopian, vocation.

Credible scenarios today are probably not as optimistic as those that could be imagined in other times. As Robinson has said, to be utopian today is “to believe that we will prevent a cataclysmic [climate] mass extinction in the next 30 years.” It is also to think that human rights can make a decisive contribution to this and other tasks, despite the anti-rights projects of authoritarian governments, conservative movements and recalcitrant corporations. This is indicated, for example, by the renewed interest in international human rights and criminal justice institutions that has followed the revelations of possible war crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine. These may seem like aspirations from another era. But, along with other progressive projects, human rights are the “real utopias” that can help preserve peace and life on the planet.

The third contribution I would like to highlight in The Ministry for the Future is its pluralistic and experimentalist vision. What finally gets global warming under control is not one master solution—a new technology, a social movement, an international agreement—but a multitude of local and global initiatives, not only political but also economic, legal, religious and cultural. 

I am convinced that the future of human rights will be equally diverse and experimental. While NGOs and other organizations continue to play an essential role, much of the movement's energy and solutions will come from very diverse actors and actions, from young people protesting in the streets and resisting the formation of organizations, to Indigenous peoples leading resistance actions and informal collectives launching network campaigns. 

If science fiction is fertile ground for human rights, so are other fields that share this dual gaze. Foresight studies has become a field and is being used in multiple professions and disciplines. Afrofuturism, feminist and postcolonial science fiction, "solar punk," and other currents are making some of the most relevant contributions and multiplying the angles for imagining the future. Even professionals firmly anchored in the present, such as journalists, are exploring new ways of researching and writing about emerging solutions to social dilemmas. The challenge is to become "short-term visionaries," as journalist Michael Pollan has put it: to be able to detect early the symptoms of social change, analyze them judiciously, and anticipate the futures (plural) that may emerge.

Imagining these futures is a condition for building them. When reasons for despair and dystopia abound, we will have to look for them in the least traveled places, starting with science fiction.

The 2020s were supposed to be the defining decade for the planet and, with it, for the human rights project. Two years ago, scientists began counting down the ten years humanity would have to halve its carbon emissions in order to avoid the most catastrophic climate change scenarios. 

But it is as if the decade has not even begun. As emissions, floods, fires, and climate refugees increase, the response of the world's governments at the Glasgow climate summit was to request that the countdown be stopped and reset. Originally set for 2020, the end of deforestation has since been postponed to 2030. Also postponed is the upward revision of the grossly insufficient national mitigation targets world governments have set, which would take us well beyond the 1.5°C of global warming that is the dividing line between a planet in crisis and a planet uninhabitable for millions of humans and non-humans.

We are left with an eight-year decade, and the next one is going to be critical. In Glasgow, governments agreed to arrive with more ambitious targets and actions at the next climate summit (COP) in November 2022, which opens a window of opportunity for the climate action and human rights movements to exert pressure through campaigning, litigation, and other strategies. 

But it will not be at the next COP that the outcomes will be defined, but in the coming months. As Bill McKibben wrote, a COP is not a match between those who seek to accelerate climate action and those who want to delay it, but rather an event that reflects the score of the previous year's game.

We are left with an eight-year decade, and the next one is going to be critical.

So, if slowing climate change is a game, how is it going and what's left to accomplish? With less than a decade to play, it is currently being won by the fossil fuel lobby (the largest delegation in Glasgow), other champions of global warming (such as agribusiness) and the governments that protect and subsidize them. However, the climate movement led by youth and Indigenous peoples, and increasingly supported by scientists and human rights actors, is a rival that is making a difference, as was clear from the protests in the streets of Glasgow. 

But the historical disadvantage weighs heavily. It would not be an exaggeration to think that the game is 4-1 and that the time has come to bring the whole team up to press the opponents on their side of the court. For human rights actors, who have had to play defense on so many issues as of late, this is an opportunity to strengthen the front line on this definitive issue.

Tying the game involves scoring on  three structural issues of climate justice. The first is mitigation, that is, drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On this front the 2021 balance sheet is encouraging. 

Through cases and rulings such as Neubauer v. Germany and Milieudefensie v. Shell, litigants and courts have been establishing the legal obligation of governments and companies to decarbonize their economies and their businesses with the ambition and urgency demanded by the Paris Agreement and the increasingly urgent calls of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These types of rights-based climate cases and campaigns underway around the world can contribute to the pressure needed to make mitigation targets more ambitious and effective.

The second front is adaptation to the new conditions of living on a warmer planet—conditions that affect the full range of human rights, from life becoming unviable in areas of extreme heat, to housing being lost by persons forcefully displaced by global warming, to physical and mental health for all, to food security threatened by the collapse of fertile ecosystems. 

Paradoxically, litigation and other human rights actions have focused much more on mitigation than on adaptation, even though adaptation is the most relevant challenge for countries in the Global South and translates into direct human rights violations. To close the gap, human rights actors will have to require more effective action from governments, as well as demand that countries and companies that have most contributed to global warming contribute to the financing of such measures.

The third front is climate justice, both domestic and international. As economist Lucas Chancel recently wrote, “there is a fundamental problem in contemporary discussion of climate policy: it rarely acknowledges inequality.” The gap is also detectable in the field of human rights. 

One of the contributions of Glasgow was to reopen the discussion of inequalities between the countries of the North that have contributed most to global warming and those of the South that suffer the worst consequences. Reparations for such consequences (for "loss and damage" in the jargon of international law) can be justified with human rights arguments, which have yet to be fully fleshed out and mobilized. 

Human rights ideas and strategies to protect and compensate the most vulnerable groups in all countries also need to be refined, as the poor contribute the least to the problem but end up paying more for the effects of climate change and the policies that aim to avert it.

As in the final stretches of matches that are being lost, we will have to try everything at once as I suggested in a previous article: applying traditional human rights concepts and rules (e.g., to defend the right to protest of climate activists being persecuted around the world), further expanding their interpretation (e.g., to recognize the rights of future generations to a stable climate), and consolidating new ones (e.g., the rights of non-humans). 

Rights-based mobilization is only one component of the diverse, multigenerational climate movement. But it is a player that can help level the playing field.

When future human rights historians chronicle the 21st century, they will probably write that the recent ruling of the German Constitutional Court on the climate emergency was a clear sign of epochal changes. Just as geologists propose declaring a new epoch in planetary history (the Anthropocene, dominated by the human species) and recognizing its first traces in the radioactive waste from the nuclear tests of 1945, human rights analysts and practitioners will recognize in the decision of the German Court an important turn in the evolution of rights.

Since the contributions of the judgment are numerous, I will comment on them in two successive blogs. In this post, I outline the case and its most novel aspects. In the next post, I will examine the practical implications and limitations of the ruling. Since previous commentary and discussions of the ruling have focused on the constitutional dimensions of the case, here I approach it from the perspective of human rights and their intersection with climate action.

Although the Court denied several of the claims presented in the four constitutional petitions it reviewed in the ruling, it granted key claims from the petition that climate activist Luisa Neubauer brought along with other young plaintiffs and several organizations that supported them. The Court found that the Federal Climate Change Protection Act of 2019 fell short in its plans to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Although the target that the law sets for 2030 is in line with the contribution that science and the 2015 Paris Agreement framework recommend for a country like Germany, the Court concluded that the absence of a detailed plan to further cut emissions from 2031 onwards violates the fundamental rights of young and future generations. 

There are three groundbreaking contributions of the ruling that warrant particular emphasis. First, by defining rights as “intertemporal guarantees of liberty,” the Court helps resolve in a single formula two limitations that human rights doctrines have shown in dealing with climate change. On the one hand, the Court deftly resets the terms of the legal and political debate by framing climate change as a matter of liberties. The real tension is not between individual liberties and government measures to control climate change (such as shutting down coal-fired power plants or abandoning new oil extraction projects). The real dilemma is between two types of restrictions on freedoms: the moderate limitation that humans alive today will have to endure as a result of those actions or the extreme restrictions (the “radical abstinence,” as the Court puts it) of all freedoms that future generations would suffer from given the desperate actions that would have to be taken to mitigate climate change in the future if we do not act today.

On the other hand, sensitivity to time and the recognition of the intertemporal nature of global warming contrasts with the scant attention to the long-term and future generations that has been common in the human rights field. Indeed, this is a “timeful” ruling, to use the eloquent expression coined by geologist Marcia Bjornerud that I used in a previous blog. It is not content with reviewing what is being done today but extends its gaze to what must be done in the coming decades. Otherwise, as the ruling says, we will simply be “offloading” the responsibility on the young, who will have to suffer the most catastrophic global warming scenarios if we do not limit it to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. 

It is also a timeful decision because it is dynamic. It understands that climate change is not a linear phenomenon, but that it accumulates and worsens over time. Therefore, taking decisive action now is not the same as taking decisive action later. Thus, the Court rightly concludes that judges must scrutinize with increasing urgency and rigor activities and policies that exacerbate warming. 

Second, the ruling answers the classic objection of governments and corporate defendants in these types of cases. They argue that, since planetary warming is a global collective action problem, holding them individually liable has no legal justification or practical utility as long as others continue to warm the planet. Following in the footsteps of the Dutch Supreme Court in the Urgenda case, the German court rejects the utilitarian logic of such reasoning and formulates the opposite argument, based on an ethics of responsibility. Regardless of what other states do, each government has a legal obligation to contribute its “fair share” to the solution of the problem, depending on factors such as the amount of GHGs it produces today and has emitted historically. In addition to being the interpretation consistent with human rights (whose protection by a state should not depend on what other states do), it is the only one compatible with the logic of the Paris Agreement, which is based on building trust between states who must contribute their share to the solution of the global problem. 

Third, the ruling rightly holds that the constitutional duty of national governments to prevent massive rights violations brought about by climate change includes the duty to contribute to the advancement and success of international accords such as the Paris Agreement. Thus, the nearly 100 climate change and human rights cases that have been initiated around the world do not replace but rather complement international negotiations like the one that will take place at the Glasgow climate summit in November.

The ruling is not only timeful, it is also well-timed. This is shown by the immediate effect it has had on policy and politics in Germany and the demonstration effect it is having around the world, as I will explain in the next post.

In envisioning possible futures for human rights, the best place to start is the present. Two tools of foresight methodologies –detecting signals of change and drivers of change-- offer particularly useful starting points. Signals of change are small innovations that have the potential to disrupt a field of practice if they grow in-scale and become widely disseminated. Think, for instance, of the potentially transformative impact that open source human rights investigations will have if they become widespread. Drivers of change are larger, structural transformations in society, technology, the economy, the environment, and politics that underlie longer-term shifts in a field. This post focuses on identifying drivers of change, particularly structural trends that raise existential challenges to human rights. I will come back to signals of change in subsequent posts.  

Five drivers of change pose particularly serious challenges to human rights.  The first one is the geopolitical challenge. The Euro-American world order inherited from the second post-war, which provided the geopolitical backbone for the globalization of human rights in the second half of the twentieth century, is no more. The initial death knell was sounded by the rise of the BRICS countries in the 2000s, which heralded a new era of multi-polarity. As it turns out, all that remains of that acronym, in terms of realistic aspirations for global geopolitical power, is the “C” for China. In the meantime, the Euro-American order imploded from within, after Brexit, Trump, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe—with help from Russia, now relegated to the role of global disruptor. The result is a more fragmented and unpredictable international legal and political order, with no obvious reliable government champions of human rights causes.

Second, the breakneck advance of information processing and tele-communications in the digital era presents a formidable technological challenge for human rights. While the story of the 2010s was about how the internet and social networks empowered and connected activists and social justice organizations across borders, the story of the dawn of the 2020s is about how those tools and other technologies such as artificial intelligence are being used to collect unprecedented amounts of personal data, manipulate human behaviour, disrupt elections, and concentrate power in the hands of digital corporations and surveillance states. As Shoshana Zuboff has shown, the technologies and institutions of the new era of surveillance capitalism undermine the conditions for the exercise of basic rights, from privacy to autonomy to political participation. Biotechnology, which enables wealthy individuals to purchase enhanced cognitive and physical capacities, raises an equally formidable challenge, as it threatens to crystallize and deepen the inequalities that are already tearing apart national polities and undermining human rights around the world.

Third, the political challenge that populist authoritarianism presents to democracy and human rights is here to stay. Anchored as it is in long-term structural transformations, its ascendancy is not a glitch in the trajectory of global liberalism.  As they polarize societies through a categorical moral division of the polity between “us vs. them,” between the “real people” and the rest, authoritarian populists strike at the core belief of human rights in the equal dignity of all. In doing so, they rely on the digital technologies (such as social media and messaging services) that were created to connect across group boundaries, and are now used to entrench tribal identities, be they ideological, ethnic, religious, nationalist, or otherwise.

Fourth, the climate and environmental crisis disrupts basic conditions of life on earth and thus those of human rights. This ecological challenge entered the mainstream in 2018-2019, as the reports of the UN expert panels on climate and biodiversity overlapped with the cascade of extreme weather events that scientists had been warning about for decades. The advent of the Anthropocene, the geological era marked by the dominance (and potential annihilation) of the planet by the human species, was heralded by those early signs of the uninhabitable planet that future generations will inherit if drastic decarbonization measures are not urgently adopted to change the trajectory that is leading the planet to 1.5°C to 2°C degrees of warming by mid-century and 3°C to 4°C degrees by the end of the century. The Anthropocene opens the gates to violations of human rights at an unprecedented scale, such as tens of millions of climate-induced deaths and waves of forced displacement that far surpass those caused by wars, and economic suffering much deeper and generalized than those associated with the Great Depression and financial crises. In all of these respects, the coronavirus pandemic may be seen as a rehearsal for the human rights impacts that worsening global warming will unleash in the coming years and decades if urgent and drastic action against it is not taken.

Finally, increasing inequality poses a key socio-economic challenge. Inequality is indeed “the antithesis of human rights,” as shown by rising income inequality in nearly all countries, the fact that less than 1% of the global population owns nearly half the world’s wealth and the reality (confirmed once more by the uneven effects of pandemic and powerfully exposed by the racial justice protests in 2020) that economic disadvantage is closely interrelated with other systems of oppression, from racism to patriarchy to discriminatory nationalism.

Taken separately, any of these structural drivers of change would entail deep transformations in the human rights field. Taken together, they amount to nothing short of an existential challenge to it.  However, a growing number of human rights actors are rising to these challenges, and these and other drivers of change also create opportunities for the human rights movement, as I will discuss in subsequent posts in this blog.

As Yuval Harari has noted, “while human rights movements have developed a very impressive arsenal of arguments and defence against religious biases and human tyrants, this arsenal hardly protects us against consumerist excesses and technological utopias.” I would add that –unless updated and revamped -- it hardly protects us against democratically elected autocrats, digital dystopias, or planetary risks such as global warming and pandemics.

Yet, the emphasis in human rights practice and scholarship is squarely on the short-term. On the advocacy front, immediate responses are needed to prevent or redress human rights violations. Relatedly, organizational strategic plans and funding cycles tend to run for two to three years at best. On the academic front, though most researchers have yet to ask the question about the time horizon, some, arguing that we are supposedly in the “endtimes” of human rights, seem to have prematurely concluded that the question is not even worth asking.

I have argued that this blind spot stems from a more general blindness to issues of time (as opposed to space) in the human rights field. This is evident, for instance, in the neglect of future generations in human rights concepts and norms. Taking a classic example, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” it considers only present generations because its provisions do not prevent them from leaving an uninhabitable planet to future generations.

Here I want to sketch a long-termist view of human rights. From this perspective, the “human” in “human rights” encompasses  not only the nearly eight billion people alive today (including young people who are likely to face existential threats in this century and the next) but also the innumerable generations yet to be born..

This view builds on recent work on long-termism in moral philosophy and in interdisciplinary fields such as global priorities research and effective altruism. It also draws on ecological and Indigenous knowledge – as reflected, for instance, in the seven-generations principle of the Haudenosaunee Indigenous people of North America, according to which decision makers need to act in the interest not only of present generations but also of the next seven generations.

Rather than a distant concern or a purely intellectual heuristic, a long-termist approach brings three key practical questions to the fore that have received scant attention in human rights. The first issue is impact. Activists go into human rights work, often at considerable cost to their individual well-being, because of an altruistic commitment to helping other people or improving the world more broadly. Yet questions about who those “other people” should be or how they can be most effectively helped have not been systematically tackled. “Impact” remains a vexing and elusive issue at best, or simply the heading of an uncomfortable section to fill out in standard reports to funders at worst. As empirical research on effective altruism has shown, well-intentioned and selfless actions that seem intuitively laudable may have a small positive impact when compared to other less obvious options. For instance, the human cognitive bias towards information that is readily available may generate disproportionate focus on sudden natural disasters relative to even more massive, yet less visible human rights violations, like the daily deaths stemming from lack of access to health care. A long-termist perspective corrects for this bias by making visible and addressing the “slow violence” of long-term injustices against people and the planet.

The second issue brought forth by a long-termist perspective is that of priorities. Once the relative impacts of different alternatives have been assessed, questions about which topics or strategies to prioritize become pressing. In light of resource constraints, what should a given human rights organization or collective prioritize (e.g., research v. advocacy, legal v. communications work, civil rights v. social rights, etc.)? Which topics should researchers and funders focus on? Which topics or challenges should the field as a whole prioritize for the future?

Prioritization is not common currency in the human rights field. Among practitioners, the very source of moral strength of the movement – the commitment to the equal dignity of all – oftentimes translates itself into an understandable impulse to commit to all issues equally. Hence the persistent difficulty of many advocacy organizations in narrowing down their list of causes or changing priorities in light of new contexts. However, if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

Many human rights scholars are also reluctant to delve deep into priorities research because they hear an echo of cost-benefit analysis, which was traditionally dominated by the narrow-minded approach of neoclassical economics. However, this is just one among many approaches found in the rich long-termist debates in moral philosophy on impact and priorities. Since, as Amartya Sen has argued, human rights are ultimately an approach to ethics (as opposed to a mere set of legal rules), long-termism should be a fertile ground for human rights research as well.

And third, long-termism raises a new set of questions about the relevant rights-holders. Put simply, long-termism is the view that “people matter just as much no matter when they exist.” As noted, this means that the rights-holders to be protected are those belonging not only to the present but also to the future. This shift in perspective is particularly urgent, as we have amassed technological power that can put at risk not only all those alive today, but all of those who could follow us as well.

Adopting a long-termist view has profound implications for human rights and lays out new work and questions for activists and researchers. For instance, in light of the evidence from research on existential threats to humanity, are there any human rights topics that need to be prioritized? The evidence points to issues such as the regulation of artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons, climate change, and the production and manipulation of viruses and other pathogens. Short of existential threats, other sources of long-term, massive impact on human rights should also be addressed, such as genetic engineering. More generally, regardless of the issues and the specifics of advocacy and research, long-termism invites us to take seriously the elusive questions, including those on impact and priorities.

The first thing to note is the government’s double standard. In early December, 2020, the central government of Antigua and Barbuda, located on the island of Antigua, virtually convened a meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean states that had signed the landmark Escazú Agreement in 2018. This binding treaty guarantees public participation in significant decisions about the environment, rights to information and access to justice in environmental matters. It also offers important protections for environmental activists, who face acute risks across the continent.

The government self-identifies as “one of the front runners within the region with a progressive climate agenda,” recently receiving $39.4 million from the Green Climate Fund. When the Category-5 Hurricane Irma decimated Barbuda in 2017, a smaller island located 40 miles north of Antigua, Prime Minister Gaston Browne said “Three years from now, we’ll be having a different conversation; we’ll be looking at a Barbuda that’s climate-resilient, that’s totally green.”

Three years later, the conversation is very different. While championing the Escazú Agreement, PM Browne is simultaneously rolling out plans to transform Barbuda’s 62 square miles into a haven for luxury hotels and sprawling estates for billionaires, all the while dismissing strong opposition from locals and violating basic human rights protected by the Escazú Agreement and international law -- including Barbudans’ right to have a say in decisions affecting their lives and lands.

Since the time of slavery under British colonial rule, Barbudans and Antiguans have lived very differently. While Antigua’s economy is fueled by large-scale tourism, like most of the Caribbean, all land in Barbuda is “owned in common by the people of Barbuda,” and “no land in Barbuda [can] be sold” – a centuries old system formally recognized in these words of the Barbuda Land Act of 2007. Barbudan culture and identity is intimately tied to the land. Barbudans steward their dry, limestone island in balance with its delicate ecology: harvesting lobster, hunting, implementing slash and burn farming techniques and allowing select eco-tourism projects through its local governance mechanism, the Barbuda Council.

After Hurricane Irma hit in September 2017, the central government evacuated all 1,800 Barbuans to Antigua. It was necessary, they said, because a second storm was imminent. When no storm arrived, armed military personnel continued to seek out and remove those who wished to remain and rebuild. Barbudans remained on Antigua for several months, while their possessions rotted from the salt and sun. 

Within days of the evacuation, developers and construction crews arrived and began round-the-clock work on an international airport a third of the size of New York’s LaGuardia, without any environmental assessment. “That’s when we realized that the government wasn’t interested in having Barbudans back,” told us John Mussington, an activist and Principal of Barbuda’s secondary school, “they wanted to redevelop the island as a private real estate venture.
 
This is the second feature of Barbuda’s story that encapsulates future challenges for human rights in the climate crisis. As Naomi Klein has written, this is disaster capitalism for the twenty-first century: the use of a crisis and military force to enact economic reforms that would not have been possible under normal circumstances.

Within months of the hurricane, the government summarily repealed the communal land protections of the 2007 Barbuda Land Act. The scope of the development since then is striking, especially given pending legal challenges to this repeal and to several individual projects. Much of the development is inside Codrington Lagoon National Park, a wetland protected under the Ramsar Convention. As the below map shows, the projects cover most of the island’s Caribbean side.

(Figure 1: Developer’s map of planned projects / Source: Uknown; Figure 2: Map of projects currently in process and Ramsar protected areas / Source: Dr. Rebecca Boger)

One development is “Peace, Love and Happiness,” funded by American business magnates Steve Anderson and Jean Paul DeJoria. This project alone, for which construction is well underway, covers 650 acres of the National Park, nearly 2% of the island. The proposal includes around 500 homes, golf courses and a marina within the Codrington Lagoon to harbor the mega-yachts of the rich.

Meanwhile, the central government has extended little peace, love and happiness to Barbudans. “Those who may intend to become economic terrorists in this country, they would have to face the full extent of the law for any infractions whatsoever,” said PM Browne in 2015. This is how he referred to those opposing his plans for the “Disneyfication of Barbuda,” as environmental anthropologist Sophia Perdirakis called the reforms in a webinar organized by the Climate Litigation Accelerator at the New York University School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. This is a remarkable contradiction for a government presenting itself as a champion of a treaty (Escazú) whose original contribution to international law is the protection of environmental defenders’ rights.

The contradiction has recently sharpened. In July 2020, after Barbuda's only member of parliament Trevor Walker attended a protest against PLH, PM Browne told the press “Anytime they do anything illegal over there I am sending the police and army … I rather fight them and resign than to turn a blind eye.” In September 2020, at another peaceful protest against PLH, two Barbudan Council Members were arrested and charged with trespass and breaking COVID rules for not wearing facemasks.

The third warning Barbuda offers for the future is the following: just as the climate crisis presents an existential threat to human rights, human rights violations open the door to environmental deterioration and further global warming. According to the Global Coral Reef Alliance, the projects in Barbuda “will cause significant, and probably irreversible, deterioration of water quality in Codrington Lagoon, Barbuda’s major fish nursery ground.” The golf courses, resorts and houses will consume land essential for farming, animal breeding and pasture, and protected species. The developments need vast amounts of fresh water, requiring large-scale desalinization, a process that generates a toxic sludge that can seriously damage coral and sea life. Replacing mangroves, sedges and wetlands with shore-line structures will drastically weaken Barbuda’s resilience to sea level rise and other extreme weather events that will intensify yearly, as the 2020 hurricane season laid bare.

Today, Barbuda’s past and future identity hang in the balance. If the government is to take seriously its proffered commitment to international human rights, the environment and future generations, it needs to respect “communal land rights and conserve Barbuda's heritage, culture and environment,” as the Barbuda Silent No More movement has demanded.

The rest of the world should be paying close attention. Barbuda's fate, for better or for worse, will be evenly distributed across the world before too long.

*Co-authored with Elizabeth Donger, MPP, who is a student at NYU Law. Her non-profit work and scholarship focuses on climate justice, migration policy and child protection. You can follow her at @elizdonger.

Today we know this was a hasty diagnosis not only because nationalism is building up walls of hatred around the world, but also because our disdain for time is taking its toll. If more evidence was needed that history did not end with the victory of liberalism and human rights, the recent elections results that consolidated illiberal democracies from India to Brazil are proof enough.

The time to cope with the climate crisis with conventional measures has also passed. My generation (X) was a product of globalization and it wasted the 30 crucial years it had to take gradual steps against global heating. Today generation Z teenagers go on school strikes to remind us of what scientists from the UN intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded: to avoid the most catastrophic climate change scenarios and the subsequent human rights crisis, urgent measures that cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 at the latest are the only way out. Recovering time also means changing the way we think about it. When globalization was booming, the prevailing disciplines, from geography to political economy and international law, focused on space. Today it is necessary to learn from other fields that hold a fuller understanding of time, such as biology and geology, considering that they are more connected with temporal phenomena such as the evolution of species and the formation of climate.

As geologist Marcia Bjornerud recently wrote, “an acute consciousness of how the world is made by—indeed, made of—time" is what is required. This vision means practical changes based on “timeful” ideas and proposals as beautifully expressed by Bjornerud.

I suggest two examples of “timeful” ideas related to human rights. The first is to acknowledge the rights of future generations. As George Monbiot wrote, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights falls short when it states “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The Declaration considers only present generations because its provisions do not prevent them from leaving an uninhabitable planet to future generations. A missing article in international law should state that “every generation has an equal right to enjoy natural resources” as Monbiot suggests.

Another timeful proposal is the declaration of constitutional emergency to address the climate crisis and the consequent rights violations, just as emergencies are declared to allow for exceptional measures during economic crises or wars. Today we know that, unless we face climate change with the same urgency and scale that is required by a world war, global warming will cause an economic collapse much worse than the 1929 great depression and a death toll greater than that of both world wars combined.

For this reason, England and Ireland declared a constitutional emergency to face the effects of climate change and the massive loss of animals and plants. Other states should follow for those very same reasons.

These are ideas that are supported by social movements with an acute awareness of time: the wave of student strikes for the rights of future generations, and the series of rallies led by organizations like Extinction Rebellion to protest against inaction against climate change. While the former reminds us of the importance of long-term of thinking, the later underlines short-term action.

The human rights movement should learn from these other movements. Therefore, it has to refine its long-term goals as well as its short-term response capacity. In regard to the first, thinking ahead of long-term trends is one of the blind spots of human rights players, like NGOs and philanthropic donors. We are habituated with one- to three-year planning and funding cycles, often failing to anticipate fundamental changes that require preparations now, but that will take place within ten to twenty years. An example is the deep changes in concepts and practice in human rights that will come about as a result of new technologies, like artificial intelligence and gene editing.

At the same time, human rights actors struggle to react with the necessary urgency in the short term. Human rights organizations have been more likely to give sluggish responses to existential challenges, such as the dissemination of authoritarian populism or climate change, possibly as a result of the inertia of conventional strategies. For instance, naming and shaming states that violate human rights are strategies that no longer work as before in a world of shameless populist leaders. Nor do they work in a fast-paced world where some of the most serious threats to human rights do not come from states but from private corporations, whose social platforms can help destabilize electoral processes in a matter of days.

If the human rights movement hopes to have a future, it will have to take time seriously.