> Chile’s Water Code was established during the Pinochet dictatorship, and still treats water as a replenishable (rather than increasingly scarce) natural resource. Under the code, companies may trade water rights to the highest bidder
If there's a bidding process already in place, the Chilean government can charge companies the bid value annually as a public natural resource rent, and place the tax revenues in a permanent fund for conversation efforts. Instead of calling a river a legal person, a formal government charted corporation can be created for the river to distribute revenues from taxes on water right holders in a pro-social manner. This would be somewhat similar to 'Cap and Dividend' proposal for climate change.
If a river becomes a legal person, the government can prosecute it for crossing some threshold. The sentence will be forced labor in a dam for 100 years. The duration may sound harsh, but rivers outlive humans by a long margin.
We managed to avoid silly things like this while making corporations "legal people." I see no reason that legal theorists should be selectively incompetent here.
Don't get caught up on the word "river," which is just a specific example. The general case is "ecosystem."
Is the implication here that "only people have rights," therefore ecosystems shouldn't? Correct me if mistaken. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that ecosystems have rights because corporations do.
This is indeed the status quo, but it's hardly immutable. Consider that 200 years ago neither women nor slaves were considered legal persons. Restating the status quo isn't an argument in its favor.
Corporations are legal entities composed of people, so it makes sense to treat that the aggregate would have similar rights as the individual. When we say a corporation has the right to free speech, we mean that you cannot restrict the right of people just because they’re acting together through a corporation.
Rivers, of course, are not people nor are they composed of people. Nor are ecosystems. People might be affected by, for example, what happens to a river. All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
Isn't that definition exactly the problem? An ecologist would disagree of course, but how curious that every other species is considered part of the ecosystem, but we are not! We're subject to all the same ecological laws.
The humanity vs. nature separateness is of course entirely invented. But it's built into our very language: consider the other-ing effect of the term "environment" for instance.
> All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
You have it flipped around. The legal wrangling is almost entirely on the part of polluters seeking to avoid accountability (to great success, I might add). It helps that the 'environmental regulations' are written by the polluting industries themselves.
They use poorly characterized mass flows through the environment (there's that word again) and pollution etiologies (often "poorly characterized" because the company covered up its toxicity research, eg PCBs) like a cryptocurrency tumbler, laundering away their own liability for poisoning their neighbors. It's unconscionable.
> When we say a corporation has the right to free speech, we mean that you cannot restrict the right of people just because they’re acting together through a corporation.
Why not? We restrict the liability of people, just because they're 'acting together' (a corp). To make that trade off fair, it seems like we should limit their 'rights' together as well. Corporations are sort of fundamentally unfair as they exist in the US, because they get almost all of the rights a real person does, but they have almost none of the responsibilities or liabilities a real person does.
Either [a] corporations should be required to be responsible for their actions (eliminate all limited liability, leadership and shareholders should become personally liable for most actions of the corporation they lead/own), or [b] corporations should loose a lot of their rights as a tradeoff for the reduced responsibilities and liabilities (like the ability for a corporation to have 'free speech').
Well for one corporations have actual people with clearly defined interests and ownership. Who can claim to speak on behalf of the river? At best it gives ownership to the representative to push their interests in an absurd farce like PETA trying to claim copyright on behalf of a monkey who took a picture of himself inadvertently. What is to stop a landowner from claiming what the river really wants is to be a cheap dumping ground for pollutants because it wants to be pretty?
The idea that the Congo and the Amazon were once the same river before the Atlantic and the Andes existed is one of my favourites for a bit of geological sensawunda.
No. This is as silly as vegans saying animals deserve the same rights as humans because we are animals too. Does that mean we have to prosecute a lion that kills a wildebeest? Or what happens when my dog kills a rodent or a cat kills a bird? Should they be imprisoned?
If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability? What happens if a river overflows and few people drown? Do we punish the river?
A question in the title aside, I love the advocacy embedded in the title. "A growing movement"? From what to what? 2 to 3 people? The article is trying to grow the movement, it isn't reporting on a growing movement.
The only way to give rivers rights is to give it personhood rights in the same vein as corporations. But that means that rivers become privately owned entities. Do we want rivers to be owned by shareholders?
Rivers, like animals, are natural resources. Nations and states are stewards of it.
> If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability?
I think that question is key to understanding what rights are and how they function in the constitution of a polity.
Animals, rivers, etc. don't interact with us in the way other humans do. There may be analogous aspects to that interaction, so we can recognize that we have a responsibility to keep rivers clean, but that's an obligation on our part, not a "right" that the river has.
When deer don't have predators (of whatever species) they overpopulate and die of starvation or of running in front of vehicles.
I'm not convinced that dying of starvation is better than a sudden death. The vehicle accidents harm humans as well as the deer. The hungry deer damage crops and gardens.
I think the overpopulation also causes the spread of parasites (ticks etc.) which carry disease.
>No, because other animals don't have mental capacity to truly understand the consequences of their action.
A lion knows full well that it survives another month when it kills a wildebeest and that it can feed it cubs. What more is there to "truly" understand?
When a mentally capable human kills another human, they do so with the understanding that killing that human will cause other humans to grieve the death of that human, and will remove that human's productivity from the world. They've made that connection and have decided to end that human's life anyway, so they are held responsible for the outcome of that. This is why people who are mentally incapable of understanding this are not punished the same way as people who are mentally capable.
A lion is not, to the best of our understanding, capable of understanding that killing another animal will cause grief to that other animal's family. If that other animal's family is even capable of understanding and/or grieving their death. And then we'd have to prove the killing was done with malicious intent, because just merely being responsible for someone's death, even as a human, is not immediately a criminal offense.
But it's a silly argument anyway because humans are often not prosecuted for the death of non-human animals, especially when that non-human animal is killed for food. So the idea that we would prosecute a lion for killing and eating an antelope is laughable when we don't prosecute a farmer for killing a cow for food.
Prey animals must have a right to get eaten by predators, just as the predator must have the right to prey on them. They both have evolved to balance each other out, after all.
Alternatively, prey animals would have to have the right to birth control, whereas predators would require a food program. Both would need to be provided by humans, of course, which would inevitably lead to an animal welfare state.
>That said, I've never really seen a consistent argument against _protecting_ prey animals from lions (and letting lions die out).
You might begin your research into this subject with reading about the reintroduction of wolves into various locations where they had been eliminated. The prey populations always fare better when there are predators around them. Without the pressure of predators to balance the population, deer and beaver and other prey animals tend to over-populate, which results in damage to the environment (over-grazing) and then eventually starvation of the prey animals.
The deer are either going to be killed by a wolf, killed by a human, or killed by disease and starvation. At least the first two options don't also cause extensive damage to the environment before they happen.
Have you spent any time watching nature? Predation? Animals fundamentally consider each other such. Cougars consider horses food and horses "prosecute" cougars if they come close enough by kicking them to death. Killing threats is what any animal capable of doing does.
Animals are fundamentally incapable of grasping the concepts of rights and would not respect them. Applying human standards to them is fundamentally anthropomorphic chauvinism and absurd hubris.
Under human standards we should start hunting or capturing more male lions because they would happily commit infanticide to make lionesses reproductively available. Naked mole rats are incestuous pedophiles. It is important to remember that nature does not care about you and cannot care about you.
First, there are plenty of example where other animals do grasp these concepts very well.
Second, as I have shown earlier humans already do "prosecute" animals for such behaviour. So why would argue that "absurd hubris" should be applied in these cases?
Third, my point was not to start "prosecuting" other animals, but that humans do not follow their own standards.
Said humans were giving the elephant more than the standard technically given that death to an animal that kills a human was a longstanding standard and would be mocked as absurd hicks even in their day. A monkey was hanged as a possible French spy and again regarded with mockery for being so stupid to think it was possible or mistake the poor creature for a cabin boy. The precedent of animal trials indicates it doesn't help the animals or justice and usually indicates a profound detachment from objective reality. Judging ideas on human precedent alone isn't a good idea. Even precedent by all judges in the 20th century.
The Bill of Rights is a list of transgressions the federal government may not make against its people. It makes no guarantees about the actions of an independent lion, nor imposes consequences.
I never understood this concept (always stuck me as 'woo') until I watched this video by award-winning environmental lawyer Thomas Linzey. I won't try to paraphrase since it would leave so much out.
We worked on a concept based on this idea a couple of years ago, at the highest of DAOs and Smart Contracts hype.
There is already the possibility to create environmental protection non-profits for a specific area. In France, and other countries, it gives you the right to participate in lawsuit and even collect reparation for ecological prejudice (https://www.euractiv.com/section/climate-environment/news/er.... You can't however sue on behalf of the river's endangered interests. Giving legal personnality doesn't necessarily change the law as the article implies but change the way the law works.
Our concept was to add 'economic personnality'. Natural resources such as a river would have a cryptoasset account collectively managed by donors. "Gardeners" are local people hired by this collective to execute maintenance tasks, or lawsuits, while this board of donors oversee the management of the founds. Compared to a local non-profit, you gain easy internationalisation of donors and more transparency on funds allocation, potentially avoiding corruption.
The key is in the governance rules. As pointed in the article, it is extremely difficult to represent fairly and combine populations' interests and environment protection at the local, national and worldwide levels.
That's just an inefficient, roundabout way to manage a environmental legal defense team (will lawyers accept crypto-Monopoly money?). But such legal defenses are actually quite ineffective (by design!) at preventing ecological harm, even when they win the lawsuit.[1]
I beg to differ. Exactly as shown your video, environmental protection is currently mainly led as an element of public policy. Hence, when it conflicts with economic and individuals' interests there is not much weight to preserve regulations and budgets.
The approach taken in recent years consist in creating or empowering an entity to represent of those interests. The more legitimate and the more economically robust is this entity, the more difficult it will be to act against its interests.
It is imperfect, but I think that this approach should be explored when existing regulations consistently fail
So this provides some legal framework to handle questions regarding environmental impacts of human activities? Is it really that difficult to implement laws that protect rivers without engaging in a debate whether a river can hold rights? Opponents will have a field trip ridiculing the argument distracting from the goal of protecting the environment.
The article is really out to lunch from a legal point of view.
> Western legal systems and governments traditionally viewed water and water rights as property, leading to overuse and contamination
That’s exactly the opposite of what is true. At least English law has never treated water as property. In England, and most of the east and midwest of the US, riperian doctrines apply to water. (I’m going to leave out the west coast, which has a nutso way of doing things.)
Common law riperian doctrine was strict: upstream property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land because downstream property owners have a right to unimpaired water quality. If we still did this, our rivers would be very clean! During the industrial revolution, the riperian doctrines were made looserc weakening the rights of downstream property owners.
The problem is that we don’t treat water like property. We can pollute it freely because nobody can sue us for it. I live on a river, and we can’t swim after a heavy rain because of all the crap washed into the river from upstream farms. If I had property rights in the water, I could sue those farmers, and the price of food would rise to reflect the externalities of farming. But we treat water as a commons, where no individual has enforceable property rights.
"If I had property rights in the water, I could sue those farmers" What I love about libertarians is that they are forever optimist about their place in the future social order.
If water property rights were more explicit and the OP didn't gain property rights in the water as part of his/her house purchase, then the house's purchase price would have had to be much, much cheaper than it doubtless was.
Right but this change occurred during the industrial revolution and also is sanctioned by the court. So either the house was purchased pre industrial revolution (so part of a historical context) or more recently. If it was purchased more recently then OP did pay for the new version of the water rights not the old ones. Second OP seems to think that the courts would settle in his favor but the very court that would do this is also the court that has weakened the water rights down stream. My original comment is simply a recognition of the pattern in which Libertarians tend to naively see a future of property and civil suits as ending up with them in the favorable position. Have I addressed your response?
You’re missing the point, which is that courts were able to weaken rights to downstream water quality because they were not property rights. Someone could leave a box on my lawn, and I could sue and get them to take it off my lawn. It doesn’t matter if that someone is my neighbor, or Haliburton. Clear, well-defined property rights are enforceable.
But when it comes to the environment, there are no property rights. Just loosey-goosey balancing of everyone’s needs to access the commons. And it leads to results exactly the opposite of what you conjecture: when it comes to water, courts and policymakers keep siding with farmers over bigger and more well funded industries/landowners. Here in Maryland, crabbing/farming has huge influence on environmental policy, despite making up a tiny fraction of the economy (just 2%).
Yes but as you clearly stated the law was "strict" before that they could not impair water quality, yet over the course of time the courts changed that. I understand the notion of converting everything to private property and having property rights infringements as being the mechanism for enhanced stewardship. However in such a system all matters are then resolved in a civil court. Perhaps I dont understand how the court system works well enough but I would argue that there is a tendency for those who can afford good council to be victorious.
Now given the historical context it sounds like you dont actually have a right to sue for water contamination. If you were suddenly granted this right it would constitute an unearned reward as the existing property doesnt contain those rights. So if this were to change I think it would make sense that you pay for this new right and thereby the price of food would decrease.
Finally I would agree that it is "loosey-goosey" the way the commons is today. However this is because there is now no concept of the public good because the world has entered zero sum dynamics. Peter Thiel explains this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkhfm6CYjE&feature=youtu.be...
The metaphorical pie doesn't size itself by its own accord or by some nebulous, external, godlike forces. Oddly enough, it grows when we don't let ourselves be ruled by people who act competently on the (mistaken) belief that wealth is inherently zero-sum. Sean Malone explains this here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iV18Xx5EkaE&t=5m19s
In California at least, there are two conflicting doctrines. They use the English common law riparian rule mentioned above alongside a doctrine of "first come, first served." It gets quite complicated.
A lot of water rights stuff was hashed out in Fresno County, which has a rich and interesting history.
The article refers to the "traditional Western view" to set up an argument about how the "Western view" has failed and we need to turn to "indigenous views of nature." But it completely mischaracterizes the "traditional Western view." The western U.S.'s system is really neither here nor there, since it does not represent the "traditional western view" of water rights.
The lower Snake River dams were put up on a river held sacred by indigenous tribes, devastating salmon spawning, which the tribes and at least one species of orca relied on for food.
I'd say that's abuse stemming from treating water as property.
Back in the mid 1800's a mine started polluting a drinking river somewhere above Denver. Suit was brought, and the mine said "yeah we are responsible but it would be too burdensome to not pollute the river". Plantiffs lost. Legal intricacies aside, always seemed like a failure of the system to me, that they could do so with such impunity.
> I live on a river, and we can’t swim after a heavy rain because of all the crap washed into the river from upstream farms. If I had property rights in the water, I could sue those farmers, and the price of food would rise to reflect the externalities of farming.
This is a thought-provoking argument. But if you had property rights, could you not also restrict access to the river so that no one else could swim on it? And what if you don't care to swim in your river but are fine with accepting upstream pollution in exchange for payment from the polluters? What if a big agro-conglomerate simply buys the river?
It seems to me that key to the traditional riperian doctrine you cite is not property rights so much as the legal regulation:
> property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land
If water quality must be maintained, what does it matter whether it is individual property owners or the EPA taking up the cause? If we can imagine a future where riperian doctrines could be retightened to strengthen the rights of downstream property owners, why not imagine one where a properly managed and funded state or federal agency takes responsibility?
> why not imagine one where a properly managed and funded state or federal agency takes responsibility?
Why bother? Existing property law should be enough. If you poison water on my property, you pay me to make things right.
There’s no need for any government involvement besides civil courts, and investigative bodies (FBI, local detectives, etc).
In practice these property owners don’t really believe in private property. They think they can just dump contaminants onto other people’s property because containment is inconvenient.
It’s not a consistent moral position and their time is coming. There will be a reckoning and they will (financially) pay for their crimes. The arc of the law is long but bends towards justice.
Don’t get me started on the upcoming resolution of Native American and chattel slave property rights, which are as yet largely unadjudicated. Most (not all) property in this country was illegally seized, and he courts have yet to rule on the true ownership of most of those plots.
what does it matter whether it is individual property owners or the EPA taking up the cause
Because, as you can see, the EPA is subject to the whims of politics and will wax and wane in effectiveness. Property rights, however, will be consistently effective.
Wikipedia on "Riparian doctrine" indicates it's a limited and specialized form of property rights.
> Under the riparian principle, all landowners whose properties adjoin a body of water have the right to make reasonable use of it as it flows through or over their properties. If there is not enough water to satisfy all users, allotments are generally fixed in proportion to frontage on the water source. These rights cannot be sold or transferred other than with the adjoining land and only in reasonable quantities associated with that land. The water cannot be transferred out of the watershed without due consideration as to the rights of the downstream riparian landowners.
It is property rights. Note that you only have any say because you live beside/near the river. People who dont own/rent land, or who live far away, get no say. The farmers can dump into the river (runoff) because they farm land near to it. Other farmers further away cannot truck waste to the river. Local farmers can use river water but outsiders cannot back trucks up and haul away river water. It is all local. It is all tied to property rights in land. A true commons would have all people, including tourists, given equal say.
Perhaps that’s the thing. The commons should be recognized as more than that. In my opinion property should be seen as an agreement with the commons, you rent property to make it private, and you at liabale to the commons for damages made to it.
Property rights haven't stopped airports near residential housing, loud music or all those software developers moving into the neighborhood.
There is nothing to suggest that with treating water like property we wouldn't also end up at the same kind of tradeoffs, pollution legal limits or "allowances" where some ill defined external influence infringes on your similarly ill defined property rights.
this idea -the concept of treating nature as a legal entity and awarding them damages to protect the environment- isn't new. see: "should trees have standing"[1].
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadIf there's a bidding process already in place, the Chilean government can charge companies the bid value annually as a public natural resource rent, and place the tax revenues in a permanent fund for conversation efforts. Instead of calling a river a legal person, a formal government charted corporation can be created for the river to distribute revenues from taxes on water right holders in a pro-social manner. This would be somewhat similar to 'Cap and Dividend' proposal for climate change.
Don't get caught up on the word "river," which is just a specific example. The general case is "ecosystem."
The corporate entity only "has rights" because it is a collection of people, and those people have rights.
Ecosystems aren't collections of people.
Is the implication here that "only people have rights," therefore ecosystems shouldn't? Correct me if mistaken. To clarify, I wasn't arguing that ecosystems have rights because corporations do.
This is indeed the status quo, but it's hardly immutable. Consider that 200 years ago neither women nor slaves were considered legal persons. Restating the status quo isn't an argument in its favor.
Rivers, of course, are not people nor are they composed of people. Nor are ecosystems. People might be affected by, for example, what happens to a river. All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
Isn't that definition exactly the problem? An ecologist would disagree of course, but how curious that every other species is considered part of the ecosystem, but we are not! We're subject to all the same ecological laws.
The humanity vs. nature separateness is of course entirely invented. But it's built into our very language: consider the other-ing effect of the term "environment" for instance.
> All of this legal wrangling over river personhood is an attempt to avoid having to show that effect.
You have it flipped around. The legal wrangling is almost entirely on the part of polluters seeking to avoid accountability (to great success, I might add). It helps that the 'environmental regulations' are written by the polluting industries themselves.
They use poorly characterized mass flows through the environment (there's that word again) and pollution etiologies (often "poorly characterized" because the company covered up its toxicity research, eg PCBs) like a cryptocurrency tumbler, laundering away their own liability for poisoning their neighbors. It's unconscionable.
is that a generic legal principle?
Why not? We restrict the liability of people, just because they're 'acting together' (a corp). To make that trade off fair, it seems like we should limit their 'rights' together as well. Corporations are sort of fundamentally unfair as they exist in the US, because they get almost all of the rights a real person does, but they have almost none of the responsibilities or liabilities a real person does.
Either [a] corporations should be required to be responsible for their actions (eliminate all limited liability, leadership and shareholders should become personally liable for most actions of the corporation they lead/own), or [b] corporations should loose a lot of their rights as a tradeoff for the reduced responsibilities and liabilities (like the ability for a corporation to have 'free speech').
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_by_age
The idea that the Congo and the Amazon were once the same river before the Atlantic and the Andes existed is one of my favourites for a bit of geological sensawunda.
And if we're upset about corporate personhood, then why does it make sense to pretend other things are people?
Edit: I don't know why this post is flaggable. What counts as a person is exactly the subject and I didn't use insulting or bigoted language.
If rivers have rights does it also has responsibility and culpability? What happens if a river overflows and few people drown? Do we punish the river?
A question in the title aside, I love the advocacy embedded in the title. "A growing movement"? From what to what? 2 to 3 people? The article is trying to grow the movement, it isn't reporting on a growing movement.
The only way to give rivers rights is to give it personhood rights in the same vein as corporations. But that means that rivers become privately owned entities. Do we want rivers to be owned by shareholders?
Rivers, like animals, are natural resources. Nations and states are stewards of it.
I think that question is key to understanding what rights are and how they function in the constitution of a polity.
Animals, rivers, etc. don't interact with us in the way other humans do. There may be analogous aspects to that interaction, so we can recognize that we have a responsibility to keep rivers clean, but that's an obligation on our part, not a "right" that the river has.
No, because other animals don't have mental capacity to truly understand the consequences of their action.
That said, I've never really seen a consistent argument against _protecting_ prey animals from lions (and letting lions die out).
I'm not convinced that dying of starvation is better than a sudden death. The vehicle accidents harm humans as well as the deer. The hungry deer damage crops and gardens.
I think the overpopulation also causes the spread of parasites (ticks etc.) which carry disease.
A lion knows full well that it survives another month when it kills a wildebeest and that it can feed it cubs. What more is there to "truly" understand?
A lion is not, to the best of our understanding, capable of understanding that killing another animal will cause grief to that other animal's family. If that other animal's family is even capable of understanding and/or grieving their death. And then we'd have to prove the killing was done with malicious intent, because just merely being responsible for someone's death, even as a human, is not immediately a criminal offense.
But it's a silly argument anyway because humans are often not prosecuted for the death of non-human animals, especially when that non-human animal is killed for food. So the idea that we would prosecute a lion for killing and eating an antelope is laughable when we don't prosecute a farmer for killing a cow for food.
Alternatively, prey animals would have to have the right to birth control, whereas predators would require a food program. Both would need to be provided by humans, of course, which would inevitably lead to an animal welfare state.
You might begin your research into this subject with reading about the reintroduction of wolves into various locations where they had been eliminated. The prey populations always fare better when there are predators around them. Without the pressure of predators to balance the population, deer and beaver and other prey animals tend to over-populate, which results in damage to the environment (over-grazing) and then eventually starvation of the prey animals.
The deer are either going to be killed by a wolf, killed by a human, or killed by disease and starvation. At least the first two options don't also cause extensive damage to the environment before they happen.
https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...
And your example of prosecuting a lion is unfortunately already reality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(elephant)
Saying a being is a "natural resource" is just despicable. Someone else could say that with equal ease about your family. Would you like that?
Animals are fundamentally incapable of grasping the concepts of rights and would not respect them. Applying human standards to them is fundamentally anthropomorphic chauvinism and absurd hubris.
Under human standards we should start hunting or capturing more male lions because they would happily commit infanticide to make lionesses reproductively available. Naked mole rats are incestuous pedophiles. It is important to remember that nature does not care about you and cannot care about you.
Second, as I have shown earlier humans already do "prosecute" animals for such behaviour. So why would argue that "absurd hubris" should be applied in these cases?
Third, my point was not to start "prosecuting" other animals, but that humans do not follow their own standards.
Mockery or not, it happened and still happens. Only two years ago in Cincinnati. That was technically not "punishment" but the result was the same.
My main point is not whether or to prosecute other animals, but that humans live double standards.
https://www.linktv.org/shows/thomas-linzey-earth-at-risk-201...
There is already the possibility to create environmental protection non-profits for a specific area. In France, and other countries, it gives you the right to participate in lawsuit and even collect reparation for ecological prejudice (https://www.euractiv.com/section/climate-environment/news/er.... You can't however sue on behalf of the river's endangered interests. Giving legal personnality doesn't necessarily change the law as the article implies but change the way the law works.
Our concept was to add 'economic personnality'. Natural resources such as a river would have a cryptoasset account collectively managed by donors. "Gardeners" are local people hired by this collective to execute maintenance tasks, or lawsuits, while this board of donors oversee the management of the founds. Compared to a local non-profit, you gain easy internationalisation of donors and more transparency on funds allocation, potentially avoiding corruption.
The key is in the governance rules. As pointed in the article, it is extremely difficult to represent fairly and combine populations' interests and environment protection at the local, national and worldwide levels.
A visual demo can be seen here http://forest.lesusineslouise.com/
That's just an inefficient, roundabout way to manage a environmental legal defense team (will lawyers accept crypto-Monopoly money?). But such legal defenses are actually quite ineffective (by design!) at preventing ecological harm, even when they win the lawsuit.[1]
[1] https://www.linktv.org/shows/thomas-linzey-earth-at-risk-201...
The approach taken in recent years consist in creating or empowering an entity to represent of those interests. The more legitimate and the more economically robust is this entity, the more difficult it will be to act against its interests.
It is imperfect, but I think that this approach should be explored when existing regulations consistently fail
> Western legal systems and governments traditionally viewed water and water rights as property, leading to overuse and contamination
That’s exactly the opposite of what is true. At least English law has never treated water as property. In England, and most of the east and midwest of the US, riperian doctrines apply to water. (I’m going to leave out the west coast, which has a nutso way of doing things.)
Common law riperian doctrine was strict: upstream property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land because downstream property owners have a right to unimpaired water quality. If we still did this, our rivers would be very clean! During the industrial revolution, the riperian doctrines were made looserc weakening the rights of downstream property owners.
The problem is that we don’t treat water like property. We can pollute it freely because nobody can sue us for it. I live on a river, and we can’t swim after a heavy rain because of all the crap washed into the river from upstream farms. If I had property rights in the water, I could sue those farmers, and the price of food would rise to reflect the externalities of farming. But we treat water as a commons, where no individual has enforceable property rights.
But when it comes to the environment, there are no property rights. Just loosey-goosey balancing of everyone’s needs to access the commons. And it leads to results exactly the opposite of what you conjecture: when it comes to water, courts and policymakers keep siding with farmers over bigger and more well funded industries/landowners. Here in Maryland, crabbing/farming has huge influence on environmental policy, despite making up a tiny fraction of the economy (just 2%).
Now given the historical context it sounds like you dont actually have a right to sue for water contamination. If you were suddenly granted this right it would constitute an unearned reward as the existing property doesnt contain those rights. So if this were to change I think it would make sense that you pay for this new right and thereby the price of food would decrease.
Finally I would agree that it is "loosey-goosey" the way the commons is today. However this is because there is now no concept of the public good because the world has entered zero sum dynamics. Peter Thiel explains this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDkhfm6CYjE&feature=youtu.be...
Just for interest, could you elaborate? How does the West Coast (of the US, I assume you mean) do things?
A lot of water rights stuff was hashed out in Fresno County, which has a rich and interesting history.
I'd say that's abuse stemming from treating water as property.
This is a thought-provoking argument. But if you had property rights, could you not also restrict access to the river so that no one else could swim on it? And what if you don't care to swim in your river but are fine with accepting upstream pollution in exchange for payment from the polluters? What if a big agro-conglomerate simply buys the river?
It seems to me that key to the traditional riperian doctrine you cite is not property rights so much as the legal regulation:
> property owners cannot impair the quality of water flowing through their land
If water quality must be maintained, what does it matter whether it is individual property owners or the EPA taking up the cause? If we can imagine a future where riperian doctrines could be retightened to strengthen the rights of downstream property owners, why not imagine one where a properly managed and funded state or federal agency takes responsibility?
Why bother? Existing property law should be enough. If you poison water on my property, you pay me to make things right.
There’s no need for any government involvement besides civil courts, and investigative bodies (FBI, local detectives, etc).
In practice these property owners don’t really believe in private property. They think they can just dump contaminants onto other people’s property because containment is inconvenient.
It’s not a consistent moral position and their time is coming. There will be a reckoning and they will (financially) pay for their crimes. The arc of the law is long but bends towards justice.
Don’t get me started on the upcoming resolution of Native American and chattel slave property rights, which are as yet largely unadjudicated. Most (not all) property in this country was illegally seized, and he courts have yet to rule on the true ownership of most of those plots.
Because, as you can see, the EPA is subject to the whims of politics and will wax and wane in effectiveness. Property rights, however, will be consistently effective.
> Under the riparian principle, all landowners whose properties adjoin a body of water have the right to make reasonable use of it as it flows through or over their properties. If there is not enough water to satisfy all users, allotments are generally fixed in proportion to frontage on the water source. These rights cannot be sold or transferred other than with the adjoining land and only in reasonable quantities associated with that land. The water cannot be transferred out of the watershed without due consideration as to the rights of the downstream riparian landowners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riparian_water_rights
There is nothing to suggest that with treating water like property we wouldn't also end up at the same kind of tradeoffs, pollution legal limits or "allowances" where some ill defined external influence infringes on your similarly ill defined property rights.
[1] https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christop...
We are sering polluted rivers because they are not owned privately and instead taken forcibly from the homesteaders by coercive and violent rulers.