The Place of Human Dignity in Environmental Adjudication

A number of scholars have argued that addressing the significant environmental problems we face today is not merely a matter of finding technical or technological solutions, it also requires that we interrogate our assumptions about the nature of our own humanness and come to terms with what this means for how we behave towards nature. This paper argues that human rights courts engage in questions of human nature and value through their use of the concept of ‘human dignity’ and, as a result, it is a concept that may have an important role to play in human rights cases of an environmental nature. Historically, however, dignity is a concept concerned with the superiority of humanity to the rest of nature, and one thought to be anthropocentric and antithetical to environmental concerns. This paper considers whether human dignity might nevertheless have a beneficial role to play in environmental adjudication by considering its role in legal adjudication from a pragmatic perspective. This paper considers an approach to dignity proposed by Jeff Malpas – one that sees humans as embedded in and constituted by place – and examines whether this approach might impact on the course of judicial reasoning in environmental cases.