On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, David Wood wrote:
> Although the idea has oftem been used to refer to 'human
> flourishing',.....................
> writers working in the field of green ethics/political ecology (eg:
> Eckersley) have found it perfectly feasible to extend this to communities,
> societies, non-human species and ecosystems as a whole.
Indeed. Somewhere, I have on paper a Universal Declaration of the Rights
of Chainsaws. That is the point about rights; they are infinitely
extensible by anyone at all, even to the point of total inconsistency. How
they can still have a political function, despite this, is the subject of
"How rights work"
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/rights.html
But to return to the issue of "rights to the city": the morally
objectionable aspect is that claim rights are being formulated for about
2 billion people, most of whom will never even hear the expression in any
language. I am inherently suspicious of that, especially if it is
coupled to advocacy of "citizenship". And even more when I see what
use is made of the citizenship discourse here in the Netherlands. That
included a proposal, circulating inside the Dutch Labour Party, to abolish
general suffrage, and replace it by a "citizenship exam" for those who
wanted to vote.
Paul Treanor
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