A Child-Centered World
On July 30, 1998, the Supreme Court of the Philippines in Minors
Oposa ruled that a group of 44 children had standing to sue on behalf
of subsequent generations. In their suit, the children were trying to
cancel agreements between timber companies and the Philippines
government. The court found “no difficulty in ruling that they can, for
themselves, for others of their generation and for the succeeding generations
file a class suit . . . based on the concept of intergenerational
responsibility insofar as the right to a balanced and healthful ecology
is concerned” (quoted in Gates 2000, 289; see also Ledewitz 1998).
The court considered the essence of that right to be the preservation
of “the rhythm and harmony of nature” including “the judicious disposition,
utilization, management, renewal and conservation of the
country’s forest, mineral, land, waters, fisheries, wildlife, off-shore
areas and other natural resources” (Ledewitz 1998, 605). The court
further stated that every generation has a responsibility to the next to
preserve that rhythm and harmony for the full enjoyment of a balanced
and healthful ecology.” That right, the court argued, “belongs to
a category . . . which may even predate all governments and constitutions
. . . exist[ing] from the inception of humankind.” Without the
protection of such rights “those to come inherit nothing but parched
earth incapable of sustaining life” (ibid.).
The court’s decision recognizes what is, I think, simply obvious:
that the right to a balanced and healthful ecology is the sine qua non
for all other rights. The court acknowledged, in other words, that
human health and well-being is inseparable from that of the larger
systems on which we are utterly dependent. The court’s decision implicitly
acknowledges the inverse principle that no generation has a
right to disrupt the biogeochemical conditions of the earth or to impair
the stability, integrity, and beauty of biotic systems, the consequences
of which would fall on subsequent generations as a form of
irrevocable intergenerational remote tyranny.
No mention of ecological rights was made in our own Bill of
Rights and subsequent constitutional development because, until recently,
only the most prescient realized that we could damage the
earth enough to threaten all life and all rights. But the idea that rights
extend across generations was part of the revolutionary ethos of the
late eighteenth century. The Virginia Bill of Rights (June 12, 1776),
for example, held that “all men . . . have certain inherent rights, of
which when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact
deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and
liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing
and obtaining happiness and safety” (emphasis added; quoted in
Commager 1963, 103). That same idea was central to Thomas Jefferson’s
political philosophy. In the famous exchange of letters with
James Madison in 1789, Jefferson argued that “the earth belongs in
usufruct to the living . . . no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands
he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to
the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might,
during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations
to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not
to the living” (Jefferson 1975, 445). Jefferson’s use of the word
“usufruct,” the legal right of using and enjoying the fruits or profits of
something belonging to another, is central to his point. For Jefferson,
“the essence of the relationship between humans and the earth,” in
Richard Matthews’s words, is “that of a trust, a guardianship, where
the future takes priority over the present or past” (1995, 256). Initially
skeptical, Madison, in time, came to hold a similar view (ibid.,
260). On the other side of the political spectrum, Edmund Burke, the
founder of modern conservatism, arrived at a similar position. In his
Reflections on the Revolution in France ([1790] 1986), Burke described
the intergenerational obligation to pass on liberties “as an entailed inheritance
derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to
our posterity” (119). For Burke, society is “a partnership not only between
those who are living, but between those who are living, those
who are dead, and those who are to be born” (ibid., 195).
It is reasonable, given what we now know, to enlarge the concept
of intergenerational debt to include intergenerational ecological debts
including biotic impoverishment, soil loss, ugly and toxic landscapes,
and unstable climate. It is entirely logical to believe that the right to
life and liberty presumes that the bearers of those rights also have
prior rights to the biological and ecological conditions on which life
and liberty depend. If Jefferson were alive now he would, I think,
agree wholeheartedly with that amendment. Similarly, Burke would
agree that the entailed inheritance of institutions, laws, and customs
must also be expanded to include its ecological foundations without
which there can be no useable inheritance at all. This suggests a convergence
of Left and Right around the idea that the legitimate interests
of our children and future generations sets boundaries to present
behavior and changes the character of the present generation from
property holders with absolute ecological rights to trustees for those
yet to be born. The echo of this tradition is sounded in our time in
documents such as the World Commission on Environment and Development
report Our Common Future, which defines sustainable development
as a way “to meet the needs and aspirations of the present
without compromising the ability to meet those of the future” (1987,
40). Similarly, the “Earth Charter” aims, in part, to “transmit to future
generations values, tradition, and institutions that support the longterm
flourishing of Earth’s human and ecological communities”
(www.Earthcharter.org).
The extension of rights to some limits the freedom of others,
thereby acknowledging that we live in a community and must be disciplined
by the legitimate interests of every member of that community,
now and in the future. Mesmerized by the industrial version of
progress, we have been slow to recognize the revolutionary implications
of that idea. But taken seriously, what do the ideas that children
have standing to sue on behalf of the unborn or that certain ecological
rights extend across time require of us? The answer is that we are required
to follow the thread of obligations back to the economic and
political conditions that affect children now and that will do so in the
future. This requires, in short, that we rethink political economy from
the perspective of those who cannot speak on their own behalf.
The most obvious of the present conditions affecting children has
to do with the distribution of wealth. It is an article of faith in the
contemporary political economy that everyone has the right to amass
as much wealth as they possibly can and that any single generation
has the same right vis-à-vis subsequent generations. As a result the
top 1 percent in the United States have greater financial net worth
than the remaining 95 percent (Gates 2000, 79).Working-class families
have watched their real income decline by 7 percent between
1973 and 1998, putting more pressure on children who receive, as
Jeff Gates puts it, “less parenting from substantially more stressed
parents” (ibid., 47). Despite the huge increase in wealth in the past
half-century, one-fifth of American children still live in poverty (ibid.,
69). To guarantee that every child has the basics of food, shelter, medical
care, decent parenting, and education means that we must address
basic problems of economic security for families. Because
poverty and its effects are often self-perpetuating across generations,
inequity casts a long shadow over the future.
Similarly, implicit in the political economy of capitalism is the
faith that the prosperity of the present generation will flow into the
future as a positive stream of wealth. Losses in natural capital, it is assumed,
will be offset by increased wealth. It is clear, however, that a
stream of liabilities—toxic waste dumps, depleted landscapes, biotic
impoverishment, climate change—cannot be nullified because natural
and economic capital are not always interchangeable (Costanza
and Daly 1992). The intergenerational balance of economic capital
created minus the natural capital lost may not be positive because the
costs of repairing, restoring, or simply adjusting to a world of depleted
natural capital will exceed the benefits of advanced technology,
sprawling cities, and larger stock portfolios.
Second, the recognition of children’s rights would require us to
rethink the taboo subject of property ownership. From that perspective
we are obliged to protect not only the big components of the
biosphere but also the small places in which children live. Children
need access to safe places, parks, and wild areas. This recognition
would cause us more often to rebuild decaying urban areas, restore
degraded places, preserve more open spaces and river corridors, build
more parks, set limits to urban sprawl, and repair ruined industrial
landscapes. But doing so would require changing our belief in the
nearly absolute rights of the landowner supposedly derived from English
philosopher John Locke.We need to reread John Locke with the
interests of children and future generations in mind. In fact, Locke’s
case for private ownership carried the caveat that land ownership
should be limited so that “there is enough and as good left in common
for others” (Locke [1688] 1965, 329; see also Schrader-Frechette
1993). The rights of children and future generations run counter to
notions of property which give present owners the rights to do with
land much as they please. At its most egregious, absentee corporations
own land and subsurface mineral rights to large portions of Appalachia
while paying minuscule taxes and practicing a kind of mining
that decapitates entire mountains (Lockard 1998). Nothing in the
law or current business ethics or mainstream economics would require
them to give the slightest heed to the rights of the children living
in those places or to those who will live there. Property rights, in a
child-centered political economy, will require that owners must leave
“enough and as good” or forfeit ownership.
Third, what do the rights of children mean for the interpretation
of other rights such as the First Amendment guarantee of freedom
speech and press? From a child’s point of view that freedom has been
corrupted to allow corporations to target children through advertising,
movies, and television programming. More fundamentally, it has
been corrupted to protect the rights of property, not the rights of
people, by allowing corporations the same legal standing as persons.A
child-centered political economy would, I think, permit no such
reading of the Constitution or violations of common sense. Freedom
of speech was intended by the founders, not as a license, but as a fundamental
protection of religious and political freedoms and should
not be interpreted as a right to prey on children for any purpose
whatsoever.
Perhaps most difficult of all, what do the rights of children mean
for the development of technology? Neil Postman once asked
whether “a culture [could] preserve humane values and create new
ones by allowing modern technology the fullest possible authority to
control its destiny” (1982, 145).We have good reason to believe that
the answer is no. But the subject is virtually taboo in the United
States. Biologist Robert Sinsheimer (1978, 33) once proposed to
limit the rights of scientists where their freedom to investigate was
“incompatible with the maintenance of other freedoms.” His argument
was met with a thundering silence. In a society much enamored
of invention, he inconveniently asked whether the rights of the inventor
to create risky and dangerous technologies exceeded the rights
of society to a safe and humane environment. Nearly a quarter of a
century later, computer software engineer Bill Joy raised the same
question regarding the rapid advance in technologies with selfreplicating
potential like genetic engineering, nanotechnologies, and
robotics. In Joy’s words,“we are being propelled into this new century
with no plan, no control, no brakes” (2000, 256). Like Sinsheimer, Joy
proposed placing limits on the freedom to innovate, assuming that
the rights of some to pursue wealth, fame, or simply their curiosity
should not trump the rights of future generations to a decent and humane
world. A child-centered political economy would begin with
the right of the child and future generations, not with those of the scientist
and inventor. It would put brakes on the rights of technological
change and scientific research where those might incur large and irreversible
risks.
Fifth, a child-centered political economy would give priority to
democratically controlled communities over the rights of finance capital
and corporations—another taboo subject. In a series of decisions
beginning with the Dartmouth College case and culminating in the
1886 Santa Clara case, the U.S. Supreme Court gave corporations the
same protections given to individuals:
We live in the shadow of a super-species, a quasi-legal organism
that competes with humans and other life-forms in order
to grow and thrive. . . . It can “live” in many places simultaneously.
It can change its body at will—shed an arm or a leg or
even a head without harm. It can morph into a variety of new
forms absorb other members of its species, or be absorbed itself.
Most astoundingly, it can live forever. To remain alive, it
only needs to meet one condition: its income must exceed its
expenditures over the long run. (Lasn and Liacas 2000, 41)
Corporations now rival or exceed the power and influence of nation-
states. The largest 100 control 33 percent of the world’s assets
but employ only 1 percent of the world’s labor (ibid.). They control
trade, communications, agriculture, food processing, genetic materi-
als, entertainment, housing, health care, transportation, and, not least,
the political process. If there is anything left out of their control, it is
because it is not profitable. Some routinely lie, steal, corrupt, and violate
environmental laws with near impunity. As a consequence there
is no safe future for children, nor are there safe communities in a
world dominated by organizations that exist partly beyond the reach
of law and owing no loyalty to anyone or to any place. The solutions
are obvious. Corporations are chartered by the state and they can be
dissolved by the state for just cause. We have implemented a “three
strikes and you are out” standard for criminals; why not hold corporations
and the people who serve them to the same standard? Wayne
township in Pennsylvania, for example, bars any corporation with
three or more regulatory violations within seven years. Many are asking
for community control of investment capital and major assets.
Nine midwestern states forbid corporate farm ownership. What attorney
Michael Shuman (1998) calls “going local” requires a rejuvenation
of democracy beginning by establishing local control over resources
and investment decisions.
Finally, as farsighted and revolutionary as the decision of the
Philippine court is, there is another and collateral right to be preserved,
which is children’s capacity to affiliate with nature and the
places in which they live. Biologist Hugh Iltis describes that capacity
thus: “Our eyes and ears, noses, brains, and bodies have all been
shaped by nature.Would it not then be incredible indeed, if savannas
and forest groves, flowers and animals, the multiplicity of environmental
components to which our bodies were originally shaped, were
not, at the very least, still important to us?” (quoted in Shepard 1998,
136). Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson calls this capacity “biophilia,”
which he defines as “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life”
(1984, 85). “We are a biological species and will find little ultimate
meaning apart from the remainder of life” (ibid., 81). Rachel Carson
defined this capacity simply as “the sense of wonder” aided and abetted
by “the companionship of at least one adult” (Carson [1956]
1984, 45).
Is the opportunity to develop biophilia and a sense of wonder
important? Can it be considered a right? The answer to the first question
is yes, because it is unlikely that we will want to preserve nature
only for utilitarian reasons. We are likely to save only what we have
first come to love. Without that affection, we are unlikely to care
about the destruction of forests, the decline of biological diversity, or
the destabilization of climate. To the second question the answer
must again be affirmative because affiliation with nature, by whatever
name, is an essential part of what makes us human.We have good reason
to believe that human intelligence evolved in direct contact with
animals, landscapes, wetlands, deserts, forests, night skies, seas, and
rivers.We have reason to believe that “the potential for becoming as
fully intelligent and mature as possible can be hindered and even mutilated
by circumstances in which human congestion and ecological
destitution limit the scope of experience” (Shepard 1998, 127). We
can all agree that the act of deliberately crippling a child would violate
basic rights. By the same token, mutilation of a child’s capacity to
form what theologian Thomas Berry (2000, 15) calls “an intimate
presence within a meaningful universe,” although harder to discern, is
no less appalling because it would deprive the child of a vital dimension
of experience. According to Berry:
We initiate our children into an economic order based on exploitation
of the natural life systems of the planet.To achieve
this attitude we must first make our children unfeeling in
their relation with the natural world. . . . For children to live
only in contact with concrete and steel and wires and wheels
and machines and computers and plastics, to seldom experience
any primordial reality or even to see the stars at night, is
a soul deprivation that diminishes the deepest of their
human experiences. (2000, 15, 82)
The result of that deprivation is a kind of emotional and spiritual blindness
to the larger context in which we live, abridging the sense of life.
Were we to take the right to a balanced and healthful ecology seriously,
we would do all in our power to protect the right of children
to develop a healthy kinship with the earth.We would honor the ancient
tug of the Pleistocene in our genes by preserving opportunities
for children to “soak in a place and [for] the adolescent and adult . . .
to return to that place to ponder the visible substrate of his or her
own personality” (Shepard 1996, 106). We would “find ways to let
children roam beyond the pavement, to gain access to vegetation and
earth that allows them to tunnel, climb, or even fall” (Nabhan and
Trimble 1994, 9).We would preserve the right to “the playful explo-
ration of habitat . . . as well as the gradual accumulation of an oral tradition
about the land [that] have been essential to child development
for over a million years” (ibid., 83).We would preserve wildness even
in urban settings. This is not nature education as commonly understood.
It is, rather, a larger subject of how and how carefully we manage
the ecology of particular places to permit the full flowering of
human potentials.