Using Mild Language to Sell “Rights of Nature” Radicalism

The nature rights movement continues to advance into respectability with woefully insufficient resistance. Too many people don’t take the threat seriously because they consider it too crazy to be real.

But the sheer nuttiness of the campaign isn’t the only reason for the movement's continuing successes. Nature rights activists seem nice. They are not verbal bomb throwers. Rather, they deploy passive language to sell radical environmental and anti-free-market agendas. That seeming mildness sedates some people into wrongly thinking that nature rights is not an acute threat to human liberty and flourishing.

A just published puff-piece interview published by The Water Diplomat with Dutch human and nature rights lawyer Jan van de Venis illustrates this tactic. Let’s take a look.