Does nature deserve rights?

Over the past few weeks, I have drawn the ire of two national figures over my Great Salt Lake research and outreach.

First, Wesley Smith of the Center on Human Exceptionalism wrote a piece in National Review criticizing Terry Tempest Williams' essay in the New York Times. Smith called the idea of granting rights to Great Salt Lake radical and subversive. According to him, acknowledging the rights of any ecosystem would cause the end of human flourishing, though it would also be unenforceable.

In a less thoughtful but higher profile kerfuffle, Ben Shapiro mocked me in his podcast for our January report on the decline of Great Salt Lake. Responding to a headline in the Washington Post, Shapiro claimed that I and other environmentalists are alarmist and never admit we're wrong. In a rhetorical two-step, Shapiro seems to simultaneously take me to task for being a godless liberal while also criticizing my recognition of God's hand in the short-term rebound of Great Salt Lake.

Before discussing either critique, we should all take a deep breath and laugh that I'm the national discussion at all. As a baby professor who is not good at much besides bicycling long distances, I hope that this unexpected attention is as short lived as it is unlikely.

However, it does provide an opportunity to discuss a question I take very seriously: how are we supposed to relate to nature? This question has been important from the beginning oft Homo sapiens some 300,000 years ago, but it has become absolutely crucial over the last 70 years as humans have become the predominant force controlling many of the Earth's great cycles.

Shapiro's criticism is shallower than Great Salt Lake right now, so I won't take too much time on that, but Smith's ideas are interesting. His center puts humans at the center of the Earth system. I agree with him on that point, but there are several reasons why I think acknowledging the rights of ecosystems are profoundly pro-human and fundamentally conservative.

In my ecology classes, I teach two basic and important terms:

• Population: the number and fitness of individuals of a single species in a given area.
• Community: the number and interactions of all living things in a given area

I then show my students a picture like the following and ask them, "Does this picture show a population or a community?"

Most say that this shows a population. After all, they are all African elephants, right? Look a little closer.

Is this a group of elephants floating on its own, in the void? Look at the vegetation, the soil, the egret, the atmosphere. Imagine the microbiome on and in the elephants. When we overcome our bias towards moving organisms that could harm us or be a food source, we start to realize that there are trillions of organisms of thousands of distinct species that are interacting in this photo alone.

Even if my value system prioritized the wellbeing of elephants above all else, I need to take an ecosystem approach to protect those elephants.

Like Smith, I believe that humans have a special role and responsibility in the Earth system. Unlike Smith, I view it as fundamentally anti-human to deny the rights of our home. We will be tempted over and over to exchange long-term ecological integrity with short-term economic or political gain. It is one of the main narratives of the past century. Our continued flourishing depends on changing that narrative.

Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the Law of the Honorable Harvest in the lecture below. This Indigenous code could inform the practical and profound dimensions of our relationship with our home. 

One of the central tenets of the Law of the Honorable Harvest is to ask permission of the ones whose lives you seek and to abide by the answer. Think how respectful and serious this acknowledgement of rights is.

In my faith tradition in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have a similar commandment in Doctrine and Covenants 59:

Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart…to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.

Whenever we forget to acknowledge the spiritual existence and agency of all parts of the Earth system, we are likely to slip into casual consumption and self-destructive exploitation. From my scientific training and religious beliefs, we must take a community approach that does not exclusively consider individual humans. To stand a chance at making it through the next hundred or even fifty years, we need to radically change our approach. We must expand our legal and moral frameworks to expressly include the Earth and all our community.

If we view economic growth or political success as competing with the environment, then we reveal our lack of understanding and foresight. A house that is eating itself cannot stand for long. You can call it radical and subversive, but I think it is profoundly conservative and sane.

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