Do the Brazil Amazon fires justify environmental interventionism?

(The Guardian, 31 Aug 2019) All the reasons that support the project of humanitarian intervention apply with equal, if not greater force, in the case of the environment.

The horrific destruction of the Amazon rainforest under Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, raises a pressing question for the world community: do the prerogatives of sovereignty entitle a nation to destroy resources within its territorial control, when this destruction has global environmental consequences? The answer delivered by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, at the G7 summit is an emphatic no. It is time for the international community to build on Macron’s lead and to recognize a right to environmental intervention patterned on the notion of humanitarian intervention.

For centuries, the international community treated sovereignty as an absolute shield against intervention in a state’s domestic affairs. International law insisted that a nation’s treatment of its own citizens and legal subjects was not a matter of international legal concern. The ideology of sovereignty authorized a nation to treat – and mistreat – its people as it saw fit.

Nuremberg shattered this understanding. At Nuremberg, the allies recognized that a sovereign’s systematic destruction of its own people was a matter of international concern and constituted an international crime.

The Nuremberg understanding gave birth to the idea that the world community need not stand by idly when a nation commits atrocities against its own inhabitants. Many human rights activists today speak not simply of a right to intervene but of an affirmative obligation to do so. Activists understand that massive human rights abuses – crimes against humanity and genocide – never remain entirely local, even when committed exclusively within a state’s borders. These atrocities inevitably create refugee problems that spill over into other nations, creating larger international crises.

All the reasons that support the project of humanitarian intervention apply with equal, if not greater force, in the case of the environment. Massive environmental crimes, such as those presently unfolding in the Amazon, necessarily have a spill-over effect, as the degradation of the rainforest will do grave, and arguably irreversible, damage to our planet’s climate.

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The Guardian, 31 Aug 2019: Do the Brazil Amazon fires justify environmental interventionism?