Right to health
Nature has rights and the rights of Nature are easy to understand and teach
Nature maintains itself, in the same way as it maintains the fractal of all living beings, through cycles, circulatory systems, and wave functions. Therefore, Nature’s health is a basic right, necessary for the preservation of life on the planet.
Right to health in Kemëntsah, Wonaan, Embera, and Cofán Indigenous languages.
“Illnesses do not come upon us out of the blue. They are developed from small daily sins against Nature. When enough sins have accumulated, illnesses will suddenly appear.”
Lots of people don’t think of health as something clear and precise. It’s more like a default state. But the reality is that health is actually a lot of interconnected, active processes that operate in balance, and to maintain balance. The more you know about it, the cooler it is!
Whether or not you believe that Nature itself is a living being, the processes of the Earth's water systems, atmosphere, terraformation, temperature, and waste processing operate like any other biological system, and when those systems are unhealthy, it impacts all of the other systems that depend on them, including human society.
In fact, we use the word “health” to refer to non-living systems, such as computers and companies. In the same way we recognized health as a basic necessity for normal function in any complex or complicated system, we know that the health of Nature is fundamental.
Nature’s right to health includes the conservation of biodiversity, the right of species to their habitats, and the preservation of ecosystems from destruction or fragmentation. Furthermore, Nature has the right to maintain the integrity of its natural circulatory systems, including wind, sand, freshwater, ocean, and ice flows.
The idea that humans are separate from nature is nothing more than an intellectual construct. When Nature loses its health, humans lose their health.
Our health, and the health of our planet are one. Lets explore this in more depth.
Nature’s right to health in science
The declaration of the rights of Nature emphasizes homeostasis as the “hallmark of life”. But homeostasis is more than just a concept, it is the signature sine function that defines the quality of life itself at the cellular, organism, and hive levels throughout all life on earth.
Western science defines a being as alive, a living being, or an organism if it exhibits the characteristics of life as distinguished from non-living matter. Generally, it must possess the following key traits:
Be constructed from one or more cells, (the basic units of life).
Carry out chemical reactions to convert energy and sustain life processes (e.g., respiration, digestion).
Regulate internal conditions to maintain a stable state, regardless of changes in the external environment.
Increase in size and complexity over time, often following a genetic blueprint.
Produce offspring, either sexually or asexually, ensuring the continuation of the species.
Reactivity to environmental stimulous (e.g., movement toward light, escape from danger).
Adaptation through evolution. Evolve over time through changes in genetic material to survive in their environment.
Use energy to carry out activities like growth, reproduction, and repair.
If an entity exhibits these characteristics (at least to some degree), it is generally classified as a living being. And after reading the list, its easy to see why many people and cultures, regardless of their spiritual beliefs, consider planet Earth to be a living being.
The Gaia Hypothesis is a scientific and philosophical theory that suggests that the Earth and its biological systems behave as a complex, self-regulating organism. It was first proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960s, with important contributions from biologist Lynn Margulis. (However to be fair, most Indigenous cultures would probably find it ludicrous that Western science claimed to originate this theory at that date, given its a fundamental part of the law of origin in many cultures predating Western science.)
Regardless, this is the science section! So keeping it simple, from the perspective of science, it’s probably best to think of Nature’s right to health as either an undisrupted wave function (homeostasis) or a cycle (biogeochemistry).
Homeostasis is a fancy word for the regulation of state of balance for living systems. Its easy to understand intuitively as a swinging arc that always comes back to the center, like the pendulum on a clock, or a child swinging in the playground. For instance, look at body temperature in humans, who like to keep it right around 36.1°C to 37.2°C (97°F to 99°F) where all our cells are the happiest doing their jobs. While it might seem that our bodies are always the same temperature unless we are sick, actually our temperature has microwobbles throughout the day and there are a ton of cool biological process that either release heat (ie. sweating) or increase it (shivering) to bring our temperature back to its happy place. The cool thing is other kinds of living beings have other temperature happy points, and other ways of getting there.
Homeostasis in planetary biogeochemical cycles refers to the processes by which Earth's systems maintain stability or equilibrium over time, despite external disturbances. These are macroscale circuits like the the interplay between photosynthesis, ocean absorption, and the release of CO₂ (through respiration and decay) which stabilizes atmospheric carbon levels over geological timescales.
So Nature has all kinds of its own intrinsic mechanisms for keeping itself in balance. Both with cycles (water cycles on the planet like blood cycles in the human body). And with feedback loops to maintain balance (when atmospheric CO₂ levels rise, the ocean absorbs more carbon dioxide, helping regulate global temperatures.).
As with your body, natural systems have a bandwidth in which they can function normally. Recent discussions about “planetary tipping points” and planetary boundaries have focused on specific natural functions and how they are disrupting the normal functions of Nature.
Just as your body continues to function partially even when it’s unhealthy, Nature it continues to function in partial ways even with significant damage. The problem is that when you get beyond a certain point, or when several functions become compromised, the body is no longer able to recover.
In the case of your body, eventually poor health leads to death. In the case of the Planet Earth, the planet changes dramatically in its capacity to support different types of life forms. The planet has experienced five mass extinctions in which plant and animal species either adapted or became extinct. Many scientists claim that the planet is now experiencing a sixth mass extinction, and that human activity is the primary reason for this major planetary transition.
Nature’s right to health in natural law
“We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
While so much of medical research focuses on curing disease, preventive medicine looks toward environmental conditions to cure human health.
The truth is Nature’s health and human health are intimately intertwined. As most people know, human bodies are 60% water. In fact, 96% of the body is water and air. Where do water and air come from? They come from the natural environment.
And as our behavior worsens, toxins in the environment are actually at the root of many chronic diseases and cancer, could be impacting rates of ADHD and autism, and are associated with a host of metabolic dysfunctions.
Healthy Nature means healthy water, healthy air, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy humans. It’s really that simple.
Nature has the right to health, and if that right is not granted by human law, in the end, Natural systems will seek a new homeostasis, with or without the ability to support human civilization.
Here are some examples of how Nature’s right to health has been violated, and the natural consequences.
Desertification: Increasing amounts of the land on the planet is turning into desert due to agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation.
Natural disaster: Increases in the Earth’s temperature are causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. It looks like hurricanes in 2024 are creating record levels of destruction.
Habitat destruction: As with blockage of any circulatory system, dams cause destruction to Nature’s natural flows, wildlife and habitats.
Nature’s right to health is key to continued production of the resources that humans need for life.
Nature’s right to health in human law
Acts protecting air and water quality have been a stand-in for the rights of Nature for many years. But we need to toughen up these laws and make them more holistic and comprehensive because including Nature’s right to health in human law improve’s people’s abilities to defend their own health and their own rights to make local decisions.
This is because Nature’s right to health is one and the same with human rights to health. For instance a landmark case against the Peruvian government, which was found guilty of violating people’s human rights due to pollution from a smelting plant.
Fighting rights to health in its downstream effects on human health is simply not as effective as fighting it more proximally when pollution begins damaging cycles humans are dependent on. Where Nature’s rights are gaining legal momentum, it’s easier for people to defend the landscapes and biodiversity of a variety of habitats.
Yet, even where Nature doesn’t yet have the right to health legally, people do, and people have been defending nature based on their own rights to have a healthy life. In fact, environmental protection laws have been on the books for decades primarily because of the recognition of the link between human health and ecosystem health.
Nature’s health has been successfully defended in several recent cases:
Upholding governmental rights to protect the environment: The United States Supreme Court has upheld the rights of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions despite a request by some states to block the standards.
Pollution costs: A settlement of $241 million was reached in July 2024 between the government and Marathon Oil for violating the Clean Air Act. More than a billion and a half was levied earlier in the year on an engine manufacturer for their failure to adhere to the same regulation.
Hydroelectric pollution: Despite claims of being a clean energy solution, hydroelectric power has caused such tremendous environmental damage that in 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers had to be sued for breach of the Clean Water Act.
Fortunately, it has been shown that corporations could stay in business even if they had to compensate for pollution. The profits would drop by 44%, according to a recent study--but they would still be profitable.
Nature’s right to health in spiritual law
Many indigenous cultures believe that all forms of life—humans, animals, plants, and natural elements—are deeply interconnected.
Many Indigenous cultures stress reciprocity between humans and the environment. For example, the Ojibwe people of North America believe in the concept of giving back to nature to maintain harmony—like offerings of tobacco when taking plants. Healthy ecosystems, in their view, require that humans engage respectfully, only taking what is needed and ensuring natural cycles remain intact.
The Amazonian Indigenous tribes emphasize the importance of biodiversity. They see forests as living networks where all species (plants, animals, humans) must thrive together to sustain the system’s health. Destruction of one element threatens the entire ecosystem.
For many Indigenous cultures, water is sacred. For example, the Lakota Sioux revere water as the source of life. They believe clean, flowing rivers reflect the health of the environment and are essential to spiritual and physical well-being.
In Andean Indigenous traditions, a healthy ecosystem follows the rhythms of Pachamama—seasons change naturally, water flows according to cycles, and animals migrate freely. When natural rhythms are disrupted, they believe imbalance (both physical and spiritual) will arise.
In conclusion, Nature’s right to health
“The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.”
Nature’s right to health is the source of thriving for all living creatures on the planet.
For decades, regular citizens as well as environmentalists have been using human rights and health regulations to advocate for Nature. As Nature’s explicit rights come into force, we are seeing an acceleration of the requirement to maintain Nature in its healthy state, which will ensure that corporations and governments pay attention to the long-term impacts of their actions.
🌏 We call for Nature’s right to respect to be included in the Rights of Nature 🌎
Written by Grace Rachmany and Drea Burbank. Grace is a professional writer and civtech expert, and Drea is an MD-technologist.
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For Nature. With ❤️.
