Upholding human rights and environmental justice.

The murder of Chico Mendes on December 22, 1998, in a remote section of the Brazilian Amazon, made inter, national headlines largely because of Mendes' connection to the global environmental movement. "Brazilian Who Fought to Protect Amazon Is Killed" the New York Times reported. Yet Mendes, a lifelong rubber tapper and labor union activist, considered his struggle to be founded not on ecology but on social justice and human rights. He had not even been aware of environmentalism until about three years before his death.

Mendes' principal aim was to protect his fellow rubber tappers' right to earn a livelihood from the forest by extracting latex from rubber trees and gathering nuts in seasons when the rubber was not flowing. Once introduced to the environmental movement, though, he was quick to realize that the international struggle to save the rain forest and his. local struggle to empower rain-forest inhabitants amounted to nearly the same thing--and in his felicitous blending of environmentalism and human-rights work lay the key to his legacy. Mendes pointed out that an intact forest ecosystem could sustain a substantial population of highly productive rubber tappers, who would have an obvious vested interest in keeping it intact. His advocacy eventually resulted in the creation of the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve, a tract of nearly one million hectares of protected rain forest.

Tragically, by speaking out, by organizing protests, by fighting to ensure that the forests of his home region would be used sustainably and equitably rather than slashed and burned for the benefit of a few rich landowners, Mendes sealed his fate: an angry cattle baron was arrested for his murder. But Mendes' example--and those of hundreds of other environmental activists around the world whose human rights have been violated-serve as powerful reminders of the links between ecology and issues of human rights and social justice. In living, Mendes proved that the enjoyment of many basic rights depends on protection of the environment. In dying, the victim of frontier lawlessness, he proved that ongoing environmental protection depends on people's secure ability to exercise their basic rights.

Environmental degradation, even in areas that seem remote, usually carries a high human cost. That cost is behind struggles like the one Chico Mendes and his fellow forest dwellers waged-struggles for what has come to be known as environmental justice. While ecologists have long warned of the damage caused by putting this planet's ecosystems under heavy stress, it took social activists like Mendes to point out that the immediate human toll of environmental destruction has usually been borne disproportionately by the people least able to cope with it-people already on the margins of society, who have perhaps been targeted as vulnerable and lacking resources to defend themselves.

In Chico Mendes' home state of Acre, in 1970, three, quarters of the land was publicly owned, unclaimed, and undeveloped. By 1980, almost all of it had been bought, and about half of Acre's land was held by only 10 people. By encouraging the fastest possible development of the frontier, the Brazilian government essentially forced the scattered inhabitants of the rain forest to pay the price of deforestation-ranging from air pollution to the spread of disease to flooding and soil erosion--while a few wealthy landowners reaped most of the rewards'

Environmental injustice-meaning the gap between our universally shared dependence on a healthy local environment and our inequitable access to such an environment-arises at all levels of society. Attacks against individual environmental activists often point to much broader injustices and human, rights violations, to attacks against entire communities whether the destruction of the rubber tappers' resource base in the Amazon or the dumping of hazardous waste in an impoverished minority town in North Carolina or the forced relocation of thousands of people in Indian's Narmada Valley to make way for a gargantuan dam project or the pollution of black South Africans' drinking water by goldmining operations. At the national level, environmental damage tends to be concentrated in poorer countries, which often overexploit their natural resources in order to feed overconsumption in richer countries. Working toward environmental justice will thus require wide-reaching policy changes in both the ecological and human-rights arenas.

Justice of any kind, however, is a fluid concept that depends on constant checks and balances. So one of the most important goals of the environmental justice movement may well be the protection of civil rights. The basic freedoms of civil society, after all-free speech, a free press providing access to in, formation, fair elections, freedom to organize in groups--are the best ways of holding those who wield power accountable. Much environmental destruction occurs in the first place simply because affected communities are powerless to prevent it. Although drastic, environmental policy reforms are essential; in other words, guaranteeing the implementation of such reforms will ultimately depend on the full protection of basic human rights-especially the rights of society's most vulnerable people.

Since Chico Mendes' murder, environmentalists and human-rights workers all over the world have staked out common ground much more readily; they are finally beginning to blend their movements. In October 1995, the Sierra Club and Amnesty International issued their first joint letter, on the link between human-rights abuses and environmental degradation in Nigeria. The broader the coalition, both groups have realized, the more its policy agendas take on universal relevance and the more political power it attains. As Ashish Kothari, lecturer in environmental studies at the Indian institute of Public Administration, has noted: "Most mass movements at the grassroots are not just human rights, nor just environmental, but inevitably both. They have to be, if they are conscious of the role of natural resources in their haves, and of the dominant forces exploiting those resources"

This collaboration is still tentative, however. Even though the agendas of the two movements have overlapped for quite a long time-on such issues as environmental health hazards and threats to indigenous peoples' resource bases-the two sets of activists still have a lot to learn from each other. Decades of fostering different approaches to advocacy have led to a certain amount of mutual distrust.

Members of Amnesty International, for instance, famous for their letter-writing campaigns on behalf of individual prisoners of conscience, have tended to feel little sympathy for eco-philosophers trying to make a case for "the rights of nature" They have a hard time understanding why ecologists seem willing to spend so much energy on abstractions-on efforts to prevent some possible future extinction of an obscure species of bird, supposedly for the eventual good of everyone-while human beings are being tortured right here in the present. Similarly, ecologists have tended to grow exasperated with the narrow human-rights focus on, single cases of abuse, pointing out that far more people are threatened by such things as desertification and water pollution than by torture.

Some environmentalist have certainly deserved their reputation for neglecting the human element of conservation.

Several badly planned ecological preservation project. come at the expense of local peoples' basic human rights. And such mismanagement, in turn, often jeopardizes the integrity of the supposedly protected areas. This pattern has been especially devastating in the developing world. In many protected areas of India, for instance, local peoples have found themselves suddenly deprived of traditional land rights and access to natural resources because of new conservation regulations. And they have responded, understandably, with increasing hostility. In one case, the creation of the Kutru Tiger and Buffalo Reserve in Madhya Pradesh displaced 52 villages of Maria tribals, many of whom have since joined an insurgent movement that occasionally conducts poaching missions and harasses park guards.

Because of such failures, and because so many developing, world preservation schemes originate with industrial, world environmental organizations, northern environmentalists have had to fend off constant accusations that they care more about the south's trees and birds than about its people. Over the last five to 10 years, though, as they learned to address the social and cultural context of their campaigns, they have been better able to demonstrate the immediate human value of intact ecosystems: the aloof tree huggers became compassionate defenders of local peoples.

Similarly, human-rights activists have recently broadened their appeal by acknowledging the environmental factors behind many of the abuses they work on-but only after decades of dealing with the consequences of ignoring ecology. Sometimes an exclusively rights-based approach to protecting local peoples has opened the door to increased environmental degradation, which in turn tends to erode the peoples' basic rights and well being.

Along the coasts of Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, for in, stance, local fishers are currently overharvesting sea cucumbers at a rate likely to wipe out supplies within about four years. By embracing the international economy and selling their bounty to wealthy gourmets in China and Japan, the cucumber fishers, known as pepineros, are able to make up to 20 times the profit they could earn from any other locally available species.

The original plan establishing the Galapagos National Park in 1974 pointedly protected indigenous peoples' right to continue their tradition of subsistence fishing. But Ecuadorean officials have failed to distinguish between indigenous peoples and new residents of the islands; many of the pepineros moved jalapagos region just a few years ago, specifically to collect sea cucumbers. Moreover, Ecuador's government has made no attempt to implement any monitoring mechanisms to ensure that the Galapaguenos are keeping their fishing within subsistence levels. As native Galapagueno ecologist Carlos A. Vaue has noted, the pepineros, who have gone so far as to take hostages in their fight to keep the fishery open, seem intent on defending their "right to destroy their own future."

Conservationists have been accused of trying to deny the rights of the pepineros; yet they could make a strong case that better environmental regulation and monitoring would, in the long run, strengthen the rights of the fishing community. In, deed, if the pepinero community were composed more of indigenous peoples who had a longer,term investment in the local ecosystem, their harvesting strategies might be quite different. In general, when human rights and ecology are given equal weight and local people not only participate in the development decisions that are going to affect them but also have a strong ecological knowledge base, communities end up acting as stewards of the local environment and also flourish socially and culturally--as on the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve.

An even broader overlap between the human,rights and environmental agendas is embedded within the history of the international human,rights movement. As early as 1948, just three years after the U.N. charter entered into force, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, representing the first international moral consensus about what people should be able to expect from civil society. Besides the personal civil liberties that form the basis of the human,rights movement, ranging from free speech to freedom from torture, the declaration also covered the broader, more communal rights to health, food, shelter, and work-the very rights at the core of the environmental movement. The Universal Declaration itself is not a binding legal document. But in later years, both sets of rights did enter into force as binding international laws in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the broader Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights.

Though the distinction between individual civil rights and more communal rights is sometimes perceived as a sticking point between human-rights and environmental workers, in the end it reveals the ultimate complementarity of the two movements in working toward environmental justice. Human-rights activists, after all, have more and more frequently recognized that some of the worst abuses they deal with originate in environmental damage at the communal or regional level. And environmentalists have realized that upholding basic civil and political rights is one of the best ways of protecting the environment;

In the ecological context, the main difference between the relevant civil and political rights and the relevant economic, social, and cultural rights is that the first are largely procedural and the second are substantive: people exercise their individual rights (such as free speech) in order to protect their environment, related communal rights (for example, the right to an intact ozone layer). The human-rights movement and the environmental movement are fighting for both sets of rights. The substantive, communal rights combine moral and scientific perspectives to uphold the protection of life, they serve the crucial purpose of laying out the things all people should be able to expect from the environment-such as clean air and water. They explain just what would constitute an environment injustice. But it is the procedural rights that perhaps provide the most common ground for the two movements, at the individual, communal, and even national level, because they are the rights that allow people to work toward the prevention of environmental injustice.

Aaron Sachs is a research associate at the Woridwatch Institute, studying issues in international development, human rights, and the social and environmental impacts of technology. He has authored numerous articles and is coauthor of the institute's latest annual report, State of the World 1995. This article is adapted from chapter eight of that report, Eco-Justice: Linking Human Rights and the Environment.'