Nature is a Human Right: The Book

Nature is a Human Right is an anthology and a manifesto. It gathers original writing from scientists, activists, artists and campaigners, each of whom approaches one idea from a different direction. Contact with the natural world, they argue, is not a lifestyle choice. It is something people are entitled to, and the book sets out to make that claim in plain language.

The argument

The case runs roughly as follows. Access to green space is measurably unequal, and the lines it follows are income, postcode, race and disability. That inequality shows up in physical health, in mental health, and in who gets the chance to recover from the pressures of urban life. Two children born a mile apart can grow up with entirely different amounts of daylight, grass and quiet. If the effects are that serious and that unevenly spread, the argument goes, access belongs in the language of rights. Amenities get funded when budgets allow. Rights can be claimed.

The contributors

The anthology's strength is that it refuses a single lens. Its essayists write from the UK, the United States, Canada and Australia, and the subjects range widely.

• rural racism and who is made to feel welcome outdoors
• economic inequality, and neighbourhoods where drugs are easier to reach than a park
• food sovereignty and community gardening as a route to independence
• placemaking, and why urban greening fails when communities are not at the centre of it
• mental health, where nature is described as necessary medicine
• disability, and the assumption that the outdoors is designed for able bodies
• the law, and the structural changes needed to make any of this enforceable

Why it was written

The book grew out of a campaign rather than a publishing deal. Its central demand is that access to healthy green space be recognised formally. A recognised right can be tested, argued over and enforced. A benefit that happens to be distributed well in some places and badly in others cannot. That framing is what separates the book from most nature writing, which tends to dwell on the consolations of landscape. The subject here is deprivation, and the questions are practical ones about who is cut off from nature, by what mechanisms, and what would have to change.