This provocative article’s main thesis is succinctly captured by the title, the human right that benefits nature. While informative with the level of details and timelines that chronicle the struggle of community organizers to secure livable clean spaces, it nonetheless perpetuates the idea that human rights are claims for specific rights independent of whatever else is happening in the world. The piece, however, highlights the need for the reframing human rights discourse. It reveals human rights as outcomes of plurality of intra- and interconnected systems with direct and indirect effects. To have a fuller grasp of the causes, motives, and effects of human rights abuses, we must adopt the systems thinking framework. Such a paradigm shift will allow us to account for determinant and affluent systems that directly and indirectly produce the human wrongs that has devastated and continue to devastate communities and the environment. The systems thinking paradigm, when applied to human rights, reveals the deliberate designs that connect the smallest single cell organism to the planet earth and beyond; it underscores the fact that human rights, in the end, benefit humans.
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