From Natural Rights to Rights of Nature
An Overview of the History of Environmental Ethics
by Roderick Nash

One can regard environmental ethics as marking out the furthest limits of American liberalism. The emergence of this idea that the human-nature relationship should be treated as a moral issue conditioned or restrained by ethics is one of the most extraordinary developments in recent intellectual history. Some believe it holds the potential for fundamental and far-reaching change in both thought and behavior comparable to that which the ideal of human rights and justice held at the time of the democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
		Figure I attempts to show what exponents of evolved or sequential ethics believe. The time line suggests that ethics awaited the development of an intelligence capable of conceptualizing right and wrong. For long periods of time, morality was usually mired in self-interest, as for some it still is. Some people pushed the circle of ethical relevancy outward to include certain classes of human beings such as family and tribal members. Geographical distance eventually ceased to be a barrier in human-to-human ethics, and in time people began to shake free from nationalism, racism and sexism. With the abolition of slavery, ethics evolved beyond the level labelled "race." Blacks, women, and all human beings gained a place in the sun of ethical theory, if not always in practice. But "speciesism" or "human chauvinism" persisted and animal rights was the next logical step in moral extension. By the 1970s there was growing support for what Peter Singer was the first to call "animal liberation." A lawyer raised the ethical stakes by proposing that humans give trees legal rights. Aldo Leopold argued in the 1940s for a holistic, biocentric morality he called "the land ethic." More recently there have been calls for "the liberation of nature," "the liberation of life," "the rights of the planet," and even defenses of the right of the solar system and universe to be free from human disturbance. Figure 2 is a schematic view of the historical tradition of extending rights to oppressed minorities in Britain and then in the United States. At the center are the natural rights tradition and the concept of intrinsic value that date to Greek and Roman jurisprudence. The diagram lists the key document that codified each new minority's inclusion within the circle of ethical consideration. This does not imply that the minority immediately attained full rights in practice as well as theory on the given date. Ethics have expanded over time and some thinkers and activists now regard na-ture or certain of its components as deserving liberation from human domination. For people of this persuasion natural rights have indeed evolved into the rights of nature.
From the perspective of intellectual history, environmental ethics is revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought. Conceived of as promoting the liberation of exploited and oppressed members of the American ecological community, even the most radical fringe of the contemporary environmental move-ment can be understood, not so much as a revolt against traditional American ideals but as an extension and new application of them. The alleged subversiveness of environmental ethics should be tempered with the recognition that its goal is the implementation of liberal values as old as the republic. This may not make modern environmentalism less radical, but it does place it more squarely in the mainstream of American liberalism, which, after all, has had its revolutionary moments, too. The two diagrams and commentary presented here are extracted from the book The Rights of Nature - A History of Environmental Ethics, by Roderick Frazier Nash (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Nash is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of California - Santa Barbara, and the author of many books and essays on environmental topics, including the classic Wilderness and the American Mind (1967). His book is a masterful and comprehensive history of environmental consciousness, as it has developed in British and American thought, from the natural rights concept of John Locke to the animal liberation and deep ecology movements of 20th century environmentalism. Grateful acknowledge- ment is given to Professor Nash for permission to reprint the two diagrams and text from his book.