Why Ecocentrism Is Essential

–

If you neglect environmental protection you incur a burden on legal human rights and legal animal rights because humans and animals depend on having clean water, clean air and atmospheric stability that doesn’t lead to drastic climate change.

In order to even know where it is ethical to draw a line in the sand on where and what amount of territory can be taken up by human development, we need to look to where environmental processes can and cannot support sentient life and to what degree.

If you neglect legal animal rights, the environment which sustains humans and animals often deteriorates because in most cases it takes more land to grow plants to feed to animals to eat those animals than eating the plants directly, so you have less land acting as a carbon sink, less land for wild animals to be able to express all their capabilities in and less land for human habitation.

And finally, if you neglect legal human rights, obviously humans suffer, but also animals to the extent that we could ideally be good caretakers, like rescuing and releasing wildlife who were injured. Plus how a chaotic inefficient human society leads to worse environmental damage.

–