If Canada had constitutional environmental rights like most other nations, the Harper government’s recent controversial omnibus bill would be illegal, says a leading Canadian environmental lawyer and author. Dr. David Boyd, author of The Environmental Rights Revolution, says that all but 16 of the 193 states belonging to the United Nations recognize the right to a healthy environment. The laggards include North Korea, Kuwait, China, Canada and the United States.
“It’s a truly extraordinary development for Canada and the United States to be the global renegades in terms of recognition of this most basic and fundamental human right,” Boyd told the Green Interview in a new, feature-length video conversation, available at www.thegreeninterview.com.
Constitutions that include environmental rights can have transformative effects on the nations that enact them, Boyd says. A constitutional right is the highest law of the land, with the greatest level of legal protection possible. Yet the environment—something every living being needs to survive and thrive—has no such constitutional protection in Canada or the United States. Not surprisingly, Canada's rank on international comparisons of environmental performance is dismal: 24th out of 25 among the wealthiest OECD nations, and 15th out of 17 in Conference Board of Canada rankings.
The Canadian government, for example, has promised to clean up the Great Lakes for decades. Yet progress is painfully slow. Without environmental rights, “there is just no way that Canadians, at this point in history, are able to hold governments accountable for those broken promises,” says Boyd.
By comparison, Argentina, which amended its constitution in 1993 to include the right to a healthy environment, has taken swift action on environmental issues. In 2008 Beatriz Mendoza, a citizen sick because of toluene poisoning, won a lawsuit against the government and 44 corporations. Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled that pollution around Buenos Aires violated citizens’ constitutional right to live in a healthy environment. Since then, Argentina has spent over $1 billion a year on remediation, including water-treatment plants, monitoring stations, 250 new environmental inspectors, and public housing.
“It’s just a truly remarkable story of progress in a very short period of time, all of which can be traced back to the constitutional recognition of Beatriz Mendoza’s right to live in a healthy environment,” says Boyd, who outlines similar successes in nations like India and the Philippines. Bolivia and Ecuador now lead the growing international movement by enshrining not only the human right to a clean environment, but also legal rights for the environment itself. In those countries, ecosystems, mountains, rivers, and all species now have legally enforceable constitutional rights.
In his Green Interview conversation, Boyd explains the legal and practical aspects of changing constitutions to include environmental rights. A professor at Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria, Boyd is the author of five books, most recently The Right to a Healthy Environment: Revitalizing Canada’s Constitution (2012).
“David Boyd is a forceful advocate for the entrenchment of environmental rights in national legal systems,” says Green Interview host Silver Donald Cameron. “Ordinary Canadians tend to think of the law as reactive, but David shows us the exciting potential of the law as a creative instrument for change.”
The Green Interview is a subscription website of extended interviews produced and directed by Chris Beckett in partnership with Silver Donald Cameron. The programs feature some of the world’s greatest thinkers, writers and observers—people whose ideas and perceptions are leading the way to a new era of sustainability. Visitors to the site can watch one interview free of charge. In addition, the interviews are available in thousands of libraries worldwide throughGreenR, the environmental database service of Gale Cengage Learning.
For further information about this interview or others at www.thegreeninterview.com, please contact: Silver Donald Cameron, host and executive producer, at sdc@silverdonaldcameron.ca or 902-446-5577.
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