The right to a healthy environment

As the environmental movement enters it's third stage to focus on global warming, it has long been recognized as a human rights issue. But it's still uncommon for leaders to speak about it in those terms.

In contrast, polluters are quick to adopt the language of freedom, rights and liberty. Conservative business groups such as the Heritage Foundation, Illinois Policy Institute, and Chamber of Commerce promote the concept of a company's economic freedom and rights to pursue wealth without restraint or accountability.

When Franklin Roosevelt spoke of economic freedom he advanced the right to food, shelter, employment, health care, education and the opportunity to have a decent standard of living. Since that speech was given, the conservative movement has focused on ensuring that Americans are never guaranteed those rights.





It wasn't yet clear in Roosevelt's time how much industrial pollution was harming the public. Given all he did for the National Parks through the CCC, I'm sure he wouldn't mind adding the right to clean air and water to his list of freedoms.

Today, major polluters seek the right to inflict all manner of sickness on the public including cancer, asthma, birth defects, pandemic disease, and more maladies yet to be discovered, along with the impacts of global warming, (such as more severe natural disasters, flooded cities, arid cropland etc.) and they wish to do it all without legal consequences. And every step of the way their rallying cry is "more jobs" as though the only way for a person to make a living is by harming others.

If I went into a person's house to poison their water, give them a disease and damage their food supply, wouldn't I justly be put in prison? Yet the polluting interests use their wealth to defend those actions in the name of economic rights and freedom.

This kind of free-market anarchism results from the millions spent on campaign contributions to Congress and every state legislature. A recent report documented the perversion of the democratic process in Illinois through contributions designed to stop public interest environmental laws.

It looks as though the same polluting interests may stop meaningful legislation in Congress to reduce global warming. It's disappointing that so few so-called representatives of the people are able to resist the lure of campaign contributions from callous and selfish polluters who trample on our right to a healthy environment.