Is a healthy environment a human right?
While this may seem like an issue for legal scholars, it has very real importance for regions like Appalachia, where I work.
We view them that way at West Virginia University College of Law‘s new Appalachian Justice Initiative, which is working to secure a better future for our region.
It follows other, more established conceptions of human rights, such as civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights, and often is classified as part of a so-called third generation of “newer” human rights.
The coal industry has profoundly exploited our citizens and damaged our environment.
The most extreme example is mountaintop removal mining – blasting off mountaintops to reach coal seams, and then dumping refuse materials into valleys.
Coal mining is not the only challenge.
The core idea of environmental human rights is that people are entitled to live in a healthy, clean and safe environment.
Of course, laws and regulations are of little use if they are not robustly enforced.
Appalachia is not some “other America”: we are fundamentally interlinked with the United States and the wider world ecologically, economically and socially.