3 - Constructing and Contesting Anthropocentric Synergies

Summary

A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.