Three words can make Biden’s environmental orders more than shiny distractions

Call me pessimistic, but are presidential executive orders about environmental issues in the United States the fidget spinners of bureaucracy? 

Give one a quick flick and watch it spin in place for a few minutes. Show your friends and family the smooth action and rotation before setting it in a junk drawer to languish in darkness. Then, in a few months or years, you rediscover it while looking for some rubber bands and wonder what else has been forgotten in the drawer. 

Is Biden’s most recent executive order, “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All,” just another tool of distraction? Time will tell, of course, but the beginning of the policy section features shiny promises and has a smooth rotational finish:

“To fulfill our nation’s promises of justice, liberty and equality, every person must have clean air to breathe; clean water to drink; safe and healthy foods to eat and an environment that is healthy, sustainable, climate-resilient and free from harmful pollution and chemical exposure. Restoring and protecting a healthy environment — wherever people live, play, work, learn, grow and worship — is a matter of justice and a fundamental duty that the federal government must uphold on behalf of all people.”

Indeed, before we can even participate in any social, cultural, traditional, political or economic activity, we need the quality of life measures promised in the executive order. President Biden himself required these things to write the executive order. Many would argue that these are fundamental human rights through a class known as environmental rights. While Biden’s order references civil rights (twice) and environmental laws, there is no explicit mention of environmental human rights or the rights of nature for that matter. At the same time, however, the language implies that human rights were on the minds of those who crafted the statement.

Human rights impose duties and obligations, and this executive order notes that the federal government has a duty to uphold a clean and healthy environment. It would have only taken three additional words to explicitly impose the human rights framework: 

“Every person must have the right to clean air.” Or, better yet, clean air, “is a matter of human rights and justice.” Why not take this approach? 

New York passed its constitutional amendment in 2021, and the citizens of Pennsylvania have had constitutionalized environmental human rights since 1971 (yes, 1971!). Other states have done this as well, and many countries across the globe.

Various case studies have shown that environmental human rights and another type of rights — the rights of nature — act to protect and restore the environment and therefore have direct and spillover benefits for humans. Consider the Los Cedros Protected Forest in Ecuador, which protects four Ecuadorian watersheds in addition to the forest, and the Whanganui River in New Zealand, which was granted personhood status in 2017 as part of a settlement with a local tribe that viewed the river as “a living force” integral to its culture. 

Furthermore, a growing body of legal and quantitative research is demonstrating that constitutional environmental human rights provide direct avenues through which individuals can gain access to clean air, clean water and a healthy environment. This research also demonstrates that we are likely systematically understating the importance of physiological resources as constraints on economic activity, economic growth and ecological and human welfare.

Congress has a difficult enough time attempting to figure out if daylight savings time should be permanent or not, so I doubt in my lifetime that we will ever see a national constitutional environmental human rights provision or a provision related to the rights of nature. This is despite the growing negative impacts of climate change, the disparate negative impacts of climate change across sociodemographic groups and research showing just how useful constitutional environmental human rights can be at improving environmental justice outcomes.

If the current federal option for securing access to fundamentally important physiological resources is to imply human rights obligations through executive orders, let’s take it a step further and gussy up these fidget spinners with explicit language. We owe it to current and future generations who go looking through the darkest of junk drawers. 

After all, doing so only costs three more words. Perhaps folks are too worried about the historical record of the social and cultural power of those three-word phrases.

Chris Jeffords, Ph.D. is an economist and associate teaching professor at Villanova University. He is also an assistant editor at the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. His research focuses on environmental human rights, environmental economics and law and economics.

Editor’s note: This piece was updated on May 5 at 12 p.m. to correct a spelling error.