ueses of natural environmen bridget
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Answer:
The importance of the environment to the fulfilment of human rights is
widely accepted at international law. What is less well-accepted is the
proposition that we, as humans, possess rights to the environment beyond
what is necessary to support our basic human needs. The suggestion that
a human right to a healthy environment may be emerging at international
law raises a number of theoretical and practical challenges for human
rights law, with such challenges coming from both within and outside the
human rights discourse. It is argued that human rights law can make a
positive contribution to environmental protection, but the precise nature
of the connection between the environment and human rights warrants
more critical analysis. This short paper considers the different ways that
the environment is conceptualised in international human rights law and
analyses the proposition that a right to a healthy environment is
emerging. It identifies some of the challenges which would need to be
overcome before such a right could be recognised, including those which
draw on the disciplines of deep ecology and earth jurisprudence.
I INTRODUCTION
The influence of environmental factors on our ability to enjoy fundamental human
rights is well recognised. Many of the rights guaranteed under international human
rights law are defined to include an environmental dimension. For example, the rights
to the highest attainable standard of health and to an adequate standard of living
depend on a certain degree of environmental quality and in several cases,
environmental degradation or destruction has been viewed as a violation of these
human rights. Many people, particularly those living in poor communities or
developing states, rely directly on the environment for their livelihoods, and
environmental problems like pollution or global warming can directly interfere with
the enjoyment of their fundamental human rights. The environment also frequently
plays an integral role in the lives of indigenous communities, such that when the
environment is damaged or destroyed it can have impacts for a wide range of social
and cultural right as well. This important relationship between a healthy environment
and the enjoyment of our human rights is well recognised. What is less well-accepted
is the proposition that we, as humans, possess rights to the environment beyond what
is necessary to support our basic human needs. The suggestion that a human right to
Explanation:
The natural environment encompasses all living and non-living things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to the Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. [1] The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:
Complete ecological units that function as natural systems without massive civilized human intervention, including all vegetation, microorganisms, soil, rocks, atmosphere, and natural phenomena that occur within their boundaries and their nature.
Universal natural resources and physical phenomena that lack clear-cut boundaries, such as air, water, and climate, as well as energy, radiation, electric charge, and magnetism, not originating from civilized human actions.
In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. In such areas where man has fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly modified into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams, and the works of mound-building termites, are thought of as natural.
- People seldom find absolutely natural environments on Earth, and naturalness usually varies in a continuum, from 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform.[2] If, for instance, in an agricultural field, the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil are similar to those of an undisturbed forest soil, but the structure is quite different.
Natural environment is often used as a synonym for habitat, for instance, when we say that the natural environment of giraffes is the savanna.