New Book: Environmental Rights by Steve Vanderheiden

• Imprint: Ashgate
• Published: August 2012
• Format: 244 x 169 mm
• Extent: 574 pages
• Binding: Hardback
• ISBN: 978-1-4094-2296-9
• Price : £155.00 » Website price: £139.50
• BL Reference: 344'.046-dc23
• LoC Control No: 2011945787

The essays selected for this volume present critical viewpoints from the debate about the need to establish rights on behalf of greater environmental protection.

Three main areas for developing environmental rights are surveyed, including: extensionist theories that link existing rights (for example to subsistence or territory) to threats of harm from exacerbated resource scarcity, pollution or rapid environmental change; proposals for rights to specified environmental goods or services, such as rights to a safe environment and the capacity to assimilate greenhouse gas emissions; and rights that protect the interests of parties not currently recognized as having rights, including nonhuman subjects, natural objects and future generations.

This volume captures the potential for and primary challenges to the development of rights as instruments for safeguarding the planet's life-support capacities and features proposals and analyses which argue the need to create an avenue of recourse against ecological degradation, whether on behalf of human or nonhuman right holders.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Human Rights: General: Environmental injustice and human rights abuse: the states, MNCs, and repression of minority groups in the world system, Francis O. Adeola; Can communal goods be human rights?, Jeremy Waldron; Philosophical issues in international environmental law, James Nickel and Daniel Magraw. Part II Human Rights and Climate Change: Greenhouse development rights: a proposal for a fair global climate treaty, Paul Baer, with Tom Athanasiou, Sivan Kartha and Eric Kemp-Benedict; Does anthropogenic climate change violate human rights?, Derek Bell; Human rights, responsibilities, and climate change, Simon Caney; Human rights versus emissions rights: climate justice and the equitable distribution of ecological space, Tim Hayward; Competing claims: human rights and climate harms, Stephen Humphreys; Human rights, climate change, and the trillionth ton, Henry Shue; Climate change, environmental rights, and emission shares, Steve Vanderheiden. Part III Rights of Nonhumans, Environment and Futurity: The rights of animals and unborn generations, Joel Feinberg; The case for biotic rights, James A. Nash; Should trees have legal standing? - toward legal rights for natural objects, Christopher D. Stone; On future generations' future rights, Axel Gosseries; The right to a green future: human rights, environmentalism, and intergenerational justice, Richard P. Hiskes; Our rights and obligations to future generations for the environment, Edith Brown Weiss; Contemporary property rights, Lockean provisos, and the interests of future generations, Clark Wolf. Part IV Rights to a Safe Environment: Toward a constitutionally protected environment, John Y. Pearson Jr; Environmental rights: European fact or English fiction?, Christopher Miller; Rights and responsibilities on the home planet, Holmes Rolston III; Human rights, environmental rights, and the right to environment, Dinah Shelton; Name index.

About the Editor: Steve Vanderheiden is Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder as well as Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University, Australia. He researches normative political theory and environmental politics and published Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change, Oxford University Press, 2008 and Political Theory and Global Climate Change, MIT Press, 2008.

For more information: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10614&edition_id=14087