The Right to Thrive Is Universal

Why should the right to thrive belong only to humans?

Humans are newcomers to an ancient world

Every life form, from the mycelial network beneath our feet to the atmospheric currents above, carries its own agency, its own purpose, and its own inherent right to flourish. We acknowledge the Earth not as a resource to be managed, but as a living collective of sovereign kin.

“The right of all the forms to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.”

We share this planet with other species whose histories reach back billions of years. In the long story of life, humans are newcomers. Life had already evolved, adapted and created the extraordinary complexity of the world we inherited long before we arrived.

And yet we have come to place ourselves at the centre of it.

We have built societies around the assumption that human needs come first and that the rest of the living world can be valued according to what it provides for us. A forest becomes timber. A river becomes a source of water or energy. Soil becomes an agricultural resource. A species becomes important when we discover that we need it.

But why should the right to flourish belong only to us?

Why should a human life be considered to have value in itself, while the value of other forms of life is so often measured through their usefulness to humans?

Intrinsic value and instrumental value

This distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value sits at the heart of the ecological crisis. If we only value the living world for what it does for us, then its protection will always depend on whether we can demonstrate its usefulness. We might protect a forest because it stores carbon, or because it supports biodiversity, or because it provides clean water. All of these things are important. But they still leave us with the same underlying assumption: that the forest needs to provide something for us in order for its existence to matter.

What if it matters simply because it is alive?

This is not an entirely new idea. Many Indigenous cultures have maintained understandings of humans as participants within a wider web of relationships, rather than beings standing outside or above the natural world. These traditions are diverse and cannot be reduced to one single worldview, but many hold forms of reciprocity and responsibility towards the more-than-human world that stand in sharp contrast to the dominant Western model of nature as resource.

The idea of human exceptionalism, however, has deep roots in Western thought too. The modern world did not invent the belief that humans occupy a privileged position, but over centuries religious, philosophical and scientific developments contributed to a growing separation between human beings and the rest of nature.

The living world increasingly came to be understood as something that could be measured, classified and controlled. With industrialisation, this way of seeing nature became a way of organising production. Forests, rivers, land, animals and minerals could be extracted and transformed at an unprecedented scale.

Nature became something outside of us, something that could be managed.

And once we imagine ourselves as separate from the living world, it becomes much easier to treat everything beyond ourselves as a resource.

This way of thinking is being challenged.

Where this thinking comes from

Over the last several decades, philosophers and environmental thinkers have developed ecocentric approaches that question the assumption that human interests should automatically sit at the centre of ethics. Arne Næss's deep ecology argued for the intrinsic value of all living beings. Aldo Leopold's land ethic proposed that humans should understand themselves as members of a wider biotic community. Earth jurisprudence and Earth system law are now exploring what law and governance might look like if they were based on the reality that humans are part of an Earth community rather than separate from it. More recently, ideas around multispecies justice have begun asking whose interests are considered when we make decisions that affect other forms of life.

Some of these ideas are beginning to move beyond philosophy and into law.

From philosophy to law: the Rights of Nature

The Rights of Nature movement is one example. Ecuador's constitution recognises rights of nature, including its right to exist, persist and regenerate. Bolivia has established legal rights for Mother Earth, and other places have experimented with giving rivers and ecosystems legal standing or forms of legal personhood.

These developments are significant because they challenge the assumption that nature exists primarily as property or as an object of human law. They attempt to create a different relationship between human societies and the living systems upon which they depend.

But there is also something worth questioning here.

We are trying to recognise the value of the more-than-human world through concepts that we ourselves have created. We give a river legal personhood. We give an ecosystem rights. We appoint human representatives to speak for it.

Is this enough to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview, or are we simply finding new ways to bring nature into a system that was designed around human needs and human ways of thinking?

I don't think this makes the Rights of Nature movement irrelevant. Quite the opposite. These experiments are important precisely because they begin to challenge the legal and economic assumption that nature exists primarily for our use. But perhaps rights are only one step in a much deeper shift.

The question may not ultimately be how we can give nature rights.

The question may be whether we can recognise that nature never needed us to give it value in the first place.

A forest does not need to become a legal person before its existence matters. A river does not need human recognition before it has its own life and integrity. The living world was flourishing long before humans developed the language of rights.

What changes when we stop asking what Earth can provide

Perhaps what needs to change is not nature's position within our system, but our understanding of our own position within the living world.

We are not outside of it.

Our lives depend upon soil, water, plants, fungi, animals, microorganisms, oceans and atmosphere. We participate in the same cycles of matter and energy as everything else that lives. Our flourishing is already entangled with the flourishing of countless other beings, whether we acknowledge that relationship or not.

Recognising a universal right to thrive does not mean that all forms of life can be treated in the same way. Humans will always depend upon other life. We eat, build, cultivate and transform the world around us. The question is not whether we can exist without affecting other forms of life. We cannot.

The question is what kind of relationship we create through that exchange.

Can we continue to organise our societies around extraction while pretending that the systems we depend upon are separate from us? Or can we begin to build a culture in which the flourishing of human beings is understood as part of the flourishing of the wider living world?

There are already people experimenting with what that might look like, in philosophy, in law, in agriculture, in ecological restoration and in new forms of governance. None of these approaches has solved the problem. Perhaps none of them can. We are still learning how to live with the implications of recognising that we are one species among many.

But something fundamental changes when we stop asking only what the Earth can provide for us and begin asking what conditions allow life to flourish.

The right to thrive was never ours to give. It was always there.

Nathalie Markiefka Founder, Rooting for Earth · about Nathalie →