Rights of Nature

I'm going to ask you to follow me down a seemingly absurd train of thought that I had today while listening to a podcast about a particular preacher who feels that hurricanes don't have rights to anywhere inhabited by humans. While I don't think that she's considered how that actually works, I was just tired enough at the time to ask myself why it doesn't work that way. Why don't we give rights to the forces of nature that we fight against and that we're trying to protect at the same time?

I think it's an actually interesting question when you look at it from the perspective of wether or not it would be a useful distinction to make. Like, right now we don't have the ability to redirect a hurricane, but we redirect rivers and dry up lakes all the time, and who's to say that those didn't have a "right" to be where they were? Sticking to just brute forces of nature, like forest fires, storms, erosion, and the like, they're a dynamic part of the ecosystem and are depended on by everthing that lives around them. That security of self sounds like something that the ecosystem should have a right to. If not to keep existing as it was, then to exist with minimal damage while not infigriging on similar rights of others around it.

Keeping in mind that we're still talking about the brute forces of nature here, not the rights of the animals themselves. I can't say anything new there, but the existnce of an ecosystem as it is already, how it moves, changes, and breathes, that I think could be worthy of that "right".

I can't remember where or when I heard it, but I remember a discussion around the idea of Mother Nature being a useful way to look at an ecosystem. A living entity worthy of protection and respect. I guess I'm expanding on that idea here, if we're wanting to respect an entity like that, then it should have rights that rival our own. It should be allowed to assert dominance over us just as we do it, even as we learn to curb it's effects. Just because we can't stop a hurricane now doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize that hurricanes are part of the costal ecosystem, and stopping them entireley could have conesquesnces. A good example of that would be forest fires, though not a perfect example as humans have been helping those along for awhile, it showed that stopping forest fires entirley has caused more damage to both parties than respecting the "rights" of the fires to take place.

I guess my goal with this train of thought was to ask, if we use rights as a way to decide who is and who isn't allowed to do something, then should nature have rights on the same level as humans?