Why do so many of us find the idea that nature might have rights so compelling or so preposterous? And why do so many serious scholars – of both human rights and environmental policy – avoid the issue altogether?
In this episode on “On Human Rights” we will go deeper in to this fascinating and thought provoking discussion through the lens of Walter F. Baber. Baber is the 2017/18 Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Public International Law at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and the Faculty of Law at Lund University. He has spent the last 30 years on environmental policies. This lecture was part of a series of human rights related lectures which RWI is co-organizing with the Association of Foreign Affairs, under the banner of the so called “Wednesday night Rights”.
Walter F. Baber
Baber was the 2009 Fulbright Distinguished Chair of Environmental Policy at the Politecnco di Torino, a Visiting Fellow in the Research School of the Social Sciences at Australian National University in 2012, and the 2016 Fulbright Visiting Professor of Political Science at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna.
Baber holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of North Carolina and the J.D. from the University of San Diego. He is a professor in the Environmental Sciences and Policy Program and the Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach. He is also an Associate of the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra and a member of the Lead Faculty Group of the Earth System Governance Project.
Baber is the author of four books and over fifty journal articles, book chapters, and conference papers. His 2009 book, Global Democracy and Sustainable Jurisprudence: Deliberative Environmental Law (co-authored with Robert V. Bartlett) won the 2011 International Studies Association Book Award for international ethics.