Rights of Nature: Realizable or A Rhetoric?

The discussions on rights and duties and their links with moral considerability have been in academic discourse since a very long time. The qualities of a human being, the most important one being his sentience i.e his ability to feel frustration, pain, anger, and satisfaction among others, make him worthy of moral respect and further endows upon him certain rights and obligations. Apart from sentience, his interests and his functionality also give rise to his worthiness. Such an understanding of rights which is humancentric in nature raises a question on the justification of the eco-centric approach to rights of living beings other than humans and natural objects which have an intrinsic value of their own. Further, when it comes to the conferment and implementation of such rights of nature, Environmentalism which operates in a particular nation plays a very crucial role as it determines through its laws and judicial precedents whether at all there is a requirement for the implementation of such rights or if implementation needed, then what should be its content and its significance for wildlife and biodiversity conservation. This paper shall critically examine the emerging jurisprudence on the rights of nature and whether any moral considerability can be associated to such rights to justify its standing in the larger discourse on human-centric environmental rights. Further, it shall evaluate the kind of environmentalism that exists in India and how is it different from that of the United States and Europe. Lastly, it shall discuss the status of such rights in India and the challenges of their implementation in the light of the conferment of such rights by nations like Ecuador which constitutionally recognized it in 2008 and also some other nations like New Zealand and Bolivia among others.