User:LeGrand Polatouche/sandbox

Earthright

Earthright names and describes the human right that all people possess as a birthright as a consequence of being born on Earth. It is the natural human right to use the resources of the planet for sustenance to support life. The things that Earthright applies to are the vital environmental resources that support life on Earth -- the atmosphere, hydropshere, biosphere, even the lithosphere. All wild plants and animals, air, water, natural processes and sytems, ecosystems, genetic diversity and so on are included.

As this right concerns tangible things it is properly classified as a propety right. But not in the sense of private property with its features of exclusivity. Earthright as a property right is a right shared with all other people as co-tenants or co-owners. Earthright has qualties of an individual and collective right but is a property right nevertheless. Earthright does not refer to public property which is understood to be things that the government owns to carry out its governmental duties. These are the same things that could be private property, but the government holds title to them instead. Earthright resources are conveniently and appropriately called common property as opposed to private or public property. More specifically they are commons property with an "s".

Ecologist Garrett Hardin famously posed a dilemma for common use of resources to which no property right pertained. He called this the Tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy described what he said would be the ultimate degradation of a common resource, such as a grazing ground where each private actor maximized his own gain by placing as many animals on it as possible. Use of commonly accessed, unowned resources might always be used to destruction under a private property, individual utility, maximizing scheme. Earthright commons property solves this dilemma by including the health of the plants on the grazing land if not the fertility of the land itself in the commons property. Such designation will demand that use of the grazing land be limited to the extent that the renewability of the grazing resourceis preserved. How this is achieved is left up to the potential users. But at least the idea that private propety rules are inappropriate for commons resources is advanced.

Earthright is fundamentally a use right or usufructory right. Enjoyment of the Earthright is individual but has duties to use these resources in a manner that does not impair the quality or availablity of these to others. For instance, one uses the Earthright to the atmosphere when one takes a breath and exhales or perhaps builds a fire to keep warm, but one does not have the right to use so much of the atmosphere that air pollution occurs. Pollution in this case would be loading the atmosphere with so much by-product of an activity that natural mitigation forces cannot deal with it, absorb or disperse it, to render it benign.

In Western society and jurisprudence, Earthright is embodied and championed by a legal principle known as the public trust doctrine. With roots in the Institutes of Justinian and English law, the PTD recognizes that the resources covered by Earthright are the common property of humanity within and without any particular country. As a consequence of the transfer of sovereignty and thus title to the Earthright resources from citizens to the government, the government accepts the duty to manage these resources as a trust, acting as a trustee with all the fiduciary responsibilities and duties that a trusee of financial resources is bound by. Each and every citizen as a beneficiary of the trust has certain retained rights to act to protect the body of the trust, in this case the vital Earthright resources, from mismanagement or damage due to incompetent or disloyal management by the government and its agencies. This includes the power to call into question acts of the legislature as well as natural resource management agencies on scientific grounds and facts rather than having to argue about political choices or economic tradeoffs of possibliy corrupt legislators and bureaucrats.