Hold the Date! Rights of Nature Debate-5/10/2021

Hold the Date! Rights of Nature Debate 

October 19, 2021 - 5:30-7:00 PM Pacific Time Zone

On Tuesday, October 19, Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Counsel with the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, and Wesley J. Smith of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, will debate the Rights of Nature.

Moderated by Professor Brian Henning, Director of Gonzaga University’s new Center for Climate, Society, and the Environment, the debate will focus on the ethical and moral considerations of the Rights of Nature, and how that applies to humankind.

Wesley J. Smith has appeared on thousands of television and radio talk/interview programs, including ABC Nightline, Good Morning America, The Laura Ingraham Show, CNN Anderson Cooper 360, and CNN World Report. He has published numerous articles on the moral importance of human life, including the works A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement and The War on Humans, editorializing some environmental activists as radicals and enemies of human dignity and the natural environment itself. He has written that we must “think about the adverse impact that granting rights to nature would have on human thriving.”

Thomas Linzey is widely credited for founding the contemporary rights of nature and community rights movements in the United States, movements which have led to the adoption of hundreds of municipal laws, and the worldwide movement focused on recognizing the rights of nature. Linzey is the co-author of Be The Change: How to Get What You Want in Your Community and We the People: Stories from the Community Rights Movement in the United States. Linzey’s work has been featured widely, including in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, and the Nation magazine. In 2007, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Top Ten Revolutionaries.” He explains, “We live at a time of overlapping environmental crises – with species extinction accelerating far faster than natural background rates, with ecosystems collapsing, with the Earth heating up. We have to confront the sad fact that our environmental legal system has failed to protect the environment, and it has failed because it treats nature as a simply a ‘thing’ that exists for human use, which means we protect the exploitation of nature over its health and well-being. This upcoming debate is part of a growing confrontation between those who believe that the existing system is fine versus those who believe a new system - one that recognizes nature and ecosystems as having legally enforceable rights of their own - is not only right, but is also necessary for the planet’s survival and for our own.”

The debate - titled “The Rights of Nature: Saving the Planet or Harmful to Humanity?” - will be presented on Zoom. Registration is free.

For questions or to register, please contact here.