Conclusion: Environmental Human Rights in the Anthropocene

The last few decades have witnessed increasing communion between the fields of environmental law and human rights. Traditionally, the field of environmental law serves to achieve desired ecological conditions, such as clean air, water and land and is captured by more than 500 international agreements, many of the world's constitutions, and in countless laws and regulations and local ordinances around the world. Human rights, on the other hand, serve to advance desired human conditions, including civil rights such as voting and socioeconomic rights such as health or education, again through a combination of international, regional and municipal legal approaches. Yet what work can the legal order do to address the Anthropocene? Environmental constitutionalism – which serves to advance both human and ecological conditions – has emerged as the common Anthropocentric denominator between the fields of environmental law and human rights, reflecting a global trend in rights-based approaches to environmental challenges Whether a given jurisdiction has or has not adopted some provisions matters much less than what it is able to do, over the long-term, to make environmental human rights real. This attention to the relationship between research and advocacy suggests a way forward in environmental constitutionalism research. If our objective becomes identifying and manipulating institutional, soci-political, and normative factors that determine the outcomes of environmental rights advocacy, our focus cannot be on developing explanatory models that do little more than predict the past. We need not shy away from contextual specificity in search of the abstract and general. With an action-oriented research agenda and an N of fewer than 200 (nation-states), why should we? This book provides a template for such an approach.