![\"<p>The](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/Environ_human_rights_lg.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/a>The book offers a new set of concepts and a new language that melds politics and environmental protection together in an effort to preserve a legacy of clean air, water, and soil.<\/p>\n
Hiskes says it presents a new theoretical foundation for human rights as the product of human relationships, and offers an argument for what philosophers call \u201cjustice across generations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJustice across generations has always been called a logical impossibility,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause justice is about reciprocity, and how can you have reciprocity with people who don\u2019t exist?<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an involved argument, but I say that environmental human rights, by their nature, are forward looking; they involve protecting the future,\u201d Hiskes says. \u201cAnd if human rights are about relationships, and we view those rights as the rights of people we care about, then we should protect the environmental rights of our own future generations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hiskes says countries around the world should amend their constitutions to add an environmental human right that would have legal standing in court.<\/p>\n
\u201cI argue for incorporating into the U.S. Constitution and all other constitutions around the world a new right, an environmental human right, which would cover future generations,\u201d he says. \u201cIt makes sense to do this, because constitutions are cultural and political artifacts that are multigenerational.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, he says, that idea is controversial, because human rights are supposed to be universal, not national.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m saying it\u2019s difficult for people to care about the human rights of anybody who is not close to them, whether it\u2019s in another country or somewhere else in time,\u201d Hiskes says. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to care about the environmental human rights of people who aren\u2019t alive yet, who are going to be living on the other side of the globe. But we need to find a new avenue for caring that allows us to think about such a global issue as the health of the environment in a close-to-home kind of way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Environmental human rights, and all human rights, depend on countries around the world reaching consensus about what human rights mean, Hiskes says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the moment, that\u2019s not happening,\u201d he says. \u201cCultures are very diverse, but what every culture has, that it shares with every other culture, is a vivid sense of its own future generations. If you could build, in every society, a sentiment to protect the environmental rights of its own future generations, not only would that go a long way to protect the global environment, but it would be a foundation on which to build a global consensus on human rights.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to Hiskes, who is editor of the Journal of Human Rights<\/em> and associate director of the Human Rights Institute, environmentalism, for the most part, has failed.<\/p>\n \u201cThousands of species are disappearing annually, the air isn\u2019t getting better globally, and being good stewards or moral people isn\u2019t enough,\u201d he says. \u201cWe need a language, a set of concepts that are going to stand up in court.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Clean air, water, and soil should be viewed as environmental human rights of present and future generations, according to a new book by political science professor Richard Hiskes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[59],"class_list":["post-2057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 10:30:57","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2057"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36750,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2057\/revisions\/36750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=2057"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=2057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}