environmentalism

Environmentalism continues its radical shift from reasonable conservationism to environmentalist earth religion. This growing faith was most recently preached in an op-ed published by the New York Times that quite literally proselytizes for nature animism.

Robert Moor, a self-described “Thoreauvian” nature writer and the author of In Trees, describes moving from New York City to the forests of British Columbia. He has not had the sylvan experience for which he hoped. After about a week of smoky air caused by annually recurring forest fires, the once “bone deep atheist” experiences a “baptism by wildfire,” a “religious conversion” into a neo-pagan faith called “scientific animism.” From “Our Forests Are Demanding a Sacrifice“:

In these moments, I stop seeing the sky as a blank backdrop. I see it as a living thing, and an angry one. I see the spirit of the forest rising up, rageful and trickstery, to hurl down thunderbolts and sicken us while we sleep. Put differently, I feel myself drawn away from scientific atheism, and toward a creed that philosophers call “scientific animism.”

Animism, put very simply, is the belief that the natural world is inhabited by spirits who can either punish us or bestow favors. Scientific animism applies this ancient lens to modern science, showing how forces in the natural world (plants, rivers, entire planets) are self-organized, self-perpetuating and self-willed. In this view, nature is not an inert, passive backdrop to human progress. It actively responds to our actions — though not always in the way we would predict.

King Cove is an Aleut Alaskan fishing village of about 400 people. It is adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, which was designated a wilderness area in 1980.

This presented a lethal problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport, meaning that very ill or badly injured people are unable to get to Anchorage during inclement weather.

A town called Cold Bay — only 20 miles away — does have an all-weather airport, so the people of King Cove came up with a commonsense solution, first proposed in 1997: Build a simple, one-lane gravel road through the Izembek National Wildlife refuge to Cold Bay so that those who need urgent care can be driven to the airport there. The proposed evacuation road would require only about 450 of the 330,000 acres in the wilderness zone, and any impact on the refuge would be de minimis. Later, to sweeten the pot, King Cove offered a land swap that would add ecologically delicate wetlands to the Izembek Refuge in return for the road.

King Cove is a remote town in the Aleutian Islands, adjacent to the 300,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. In 1980, the refuge was designated a wilderness area. That caused a severe problem for the people of King Cove. The nearest full-service hospital is in Anchorage, 900 miles away. The town does not have an all-weather airport. This means that people Read More ›

We live in irrational times epitomized by the “rights of nature” (RoN) movement that seeks to grant human-type rights to various aspects of the natural world, including geological features.

Alas, the movement is succeeding. Rivers have been granted rights, such as the right to flow (so much for flood control and hydroelectricity projects). Glaciers have been granted rights. A mountain in New Zealand has rights. The waves in a Spanish bay have rights. Copper mining was stopped in Panama because of the supposed right of the earth to keep its own ore. In the U.S., Canada, and the UK, various municipalities have granted rights to nature, lakes, water, and trees. There is a radical bill pending in the English Parliament to grant rights to nature.

The most recent iteration of this nonsense sees arctic ice as having “agency” and therefore entitled to rights. An academic journal article started the sea-ice-rights advocacy ball rolling last year. From “Toward Rights of Sea Ice” (citations omitted):

Importantly, RoN hold the potential for the integration of a new ethical approach for Arctic sea ice, providing a promising perspective that emphasizes relationships, interdependence, and the well-being of all entities. The latter may have both conceptual and normative implications on the current legal treatment of Arctic sea ice, both of which may unfold in different manners. Conceptually, the ethics inherently embedded in RoN fosters a nurturing and reciprocal relationship with nature and the more-than-human and thus the Arctic environment as a whole.

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.

The “nature rights” movement continues to advance. Now, a bill has been presented for consideration in the U.K. House of Lords by a member of the Green Party to redefine “nature” as a “subject” with enforceable “rights.”

The “Nature’s Rights Bill 2026” is as radical as it is long. It recognizes “Nature” (capital N) as “a legal subject and rights bearing entity” that essentially includes everything that exists on the planet:

“Nature” means the interconnected community of living organisms, ecosystems, habitats, species, landscapes, seascapes, geological processes, waters, soils, atmosphere, climate systems and natural cycles, including the evolutionary and regenerative dynamics of life on Earth.

The putative rights of Nature are all-encompassing:

(1) Nature has the following inherent rights—
(a) the right to exist, persist and evolve;
(b) the right to maintain and regenerate ecological integrity;
(c) the right to restoration and regeneration where harm has occurred;
(d) the right to be free from pollution, contamination and degradation that threatens ecological integrity, resilience or health;
(e) the right to maintain natural cycles, functions and processes, including hydrological, climatic, geological, soil, nutrient, reproductive, evolutionary and ecological processes;
(f) the right to maintain ecological connectivity, diversity, abundance and resilience; and
(g) the right to exist, regenerate and flourish within safe ecological limits, including Planetary Boundaries and Earth System Boundaries so far as applicable.

If everything has rights — trees, geological features, animals, waves (yes, waves!) — then the core principle protecting human liberty becomes as worthless as currency during a wild inflation. Now, illustrating the Luddite sensibilities that permeate environmentalism generally and the nature rights movement specifically, a science journal has published advocacy by three astrobiology “ethicists” urging that planets, moons, and even space microbes be granted rights. The authors are earnestly serious about their subject. They expend thousands of words discussing the history of the rights of nature movement and existing treaties that apply to space exploration. They then argue that planets be deemed juridical entities, a proposal that environmental radicals have previously urged apply to the moon, i.e., “the right to Read More ›

The “nature rights” movement has infused environmentalism with unscientific mysticism. In spite of — or perhaps because of — that, its influence continues to grow as geological features like rivers, glaciers, and a mountain have been declared in law to be living persons endowed with rights. Adding to that threat, elite institutions such as law societies, science and medical journals, and grandees at the U.N. are increasingly embracing the cause. In the latest example, Cambridge University’s new policy journal Public Humanities will devote an issue to promoting the rights of nature. From the call for papers: We urgently need to change the way we relate to nature. One of the ways to do so is to consider nature as a Read More ›

Science, medical, and bioethics journals are setting themselves up as the new political resistance to Trump policies, most particularly around global warming controversies. For example, The Lancet published a piece blaming the Los Angeles fires on climate change, which is hardly a medical issue properly understood. A bit later — as I wrote about here — a major bioethics journal published an advocacy article asserting that it is up to bioethicists to prevent global warming. Not to be undone, JAMA has just published a column decrying Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and claiming that preventing climate change is now up to doctors. From, “Defying Environmental Deregulation:” These policy changes may appear catastrophic for effective climate action, but they Read More ›

Environmentalism is becoming increasingly irrational and unscientific. The “nature rights” movement, for example, has convinced governments and judges to assign personhood, “rights,” and, laughably, even “responsibilities” to geological features. Concomitantly, the increasing advocacy in many scientific papers to “listen to the wisdom of indigenous people” in determining environmental policies reflects this ongoing shift away from empiricism in environmental research and advocacy.

Yes, indigenous people were and are keen observers of nature and live more softly on the land. But relying on “indigenous wisdom” to craft environmental policies suitable to the needs of modern societies makes little sense. Many of their practices were steeped in religious and mystical beliefs. They developed comparatively rudimentary technologies, had no electricity, and were required to feed, house, and otherwise provide for far fewer people than the 8 billion of us living today.

But don’t tell that to the increasingly ideological science establishment. A new paper published in Nature Communications goes deeper into “indigenous wisdom” argumentation, urging the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) environmental research sites to collect and analyze data in a manner accommodating of indigenous sensibilities.

It’s all about equity, don’t you know.