This article is republished from National Review with the permission of the author.

The world’s two most influential professional science journals probably are Science and Nature. But they no longer limit their jurisdiction to science. Both are now highly ideological to the extent that each has now lent its august pages to boosting the “nature rights” movement.

Science pushed “nature rights” back in 2019. Now Nature has jumped on the bandwagon, publishing an advocacy piece to coincide with Panama’s pushing a “Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature” in the United Nations General Assembly.

The article’s title starts out making a hubristic assumption: “Nature has Rights: It’s Time the World Recognized Them.”

Image Credit: StraSyP - Adobe Stock

Really? Since when? Based on what? Says who?

“Nature rights” laws are meant to hamstring human thriving in the name of fighting climate change (among other environmental causes) through the means of destroying disfavored industries like oil and natural gas and undermining capitalism. From the article:

As catastrophic climate and ecological change continues to unfold around us, it is clear that existing legal frameworks are not built to stop it, nor to adequately protect nature. Most of the current environmental laws simply put a report, a timeline or a price in the way of the continued, long-term destruction of nature. It is unacceptable that even corporations have legal rights, but nature largely has none.

Ah, the corporate boogeyman again. Such a trite argument.

Rights belong exclusively in the human domain as only we are capable of identifying, comprehending, and honoring them. Rights also imply responsibilities. Again, only humans can assume responsibilities. (Yes, I know that some humans cannot due to immaturity or pathology, but by nature we are moral beings.)

Corporations are human enterprises. Hence, corporations should have rights, as they must also assume duties.

• “Nature” consists of all that is. So, viruses have rights? Snails? Weeds? Pollen? Air?

Nothing in nature — except us — is capable of assuming duties. Hence, if we decide to invent rights for nature — something only we can do — humans will be obliged to honor them. But nothing else in the universe will honor our rights or any aspect of nature’s because the rest of creation isn’t capable of comprehending the concept! The very notion is irrational.

Their proposal has sharp teeth (my emphasis):

In the future, the needs of healthy natural ecosystems must be considered in all decision-making processes. This will be one of the most effective ways to hold corporations, governments and people legally accountable to — and financially responsible for — their impact on nature.

Did you catch that?

It wouldn’t just be corporations sued into the dirt. Or taxpayers. Each and every one of us could find ourselves behind the eight-ball if we violate the rights that extremists are able to grant to nature. The “go after individuals too” approach has been proposed already in England — to be enforced by a Nature Rights Tribunal, no less — under legislation introduced in the House of Lords to grant rights to nature. Can we say, “authoritarian?”

The authors also want to put humans last:

The rights-of-nature framework that we are proposing includes many ecocentric principles that help with its implementation. These include in dubio pro natura, meaning when in used as an excuse to do nothing.

Making these views of even greater concern, most nature rights laws and proposals grant universal legal standing to anyone who believes that nature’s rights to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution ” have been violated. Imagine the lawfare possibilities!

As these types typically do, the authors try to bootstrap their radical proposal as similar to past remedied injustices against humans:

Any time that society has recognized the legal rights of a new group, it has started out as a radical concept. Over time it becomes even more radical to think that at one point those groups did not have the most basic legal rights; consider, for example, civil rights and women’s suffrage.

No. Women are not akin to mushrooms, rivers, or granite outcroppings.

Sigh. None of this belongs in a prestigious science journal. But here we are. And considering that Science, Nature, The Lancet, the National Geographic Society, the elite academy, and the U.N. — not an exclusive list — are now exercising their considerable heft to promote “nature rights,” the movement has unquestionably become an establishment policy juggernaut.