Push On to Grant ‘Rights’ to Arctic Sea Ice

We live in irrational times epitomized by the “rights of nature” (RoN) movement that seeks to grant human-type rights to various aspects of the natural world, including geological features.

Alas, the movement is succeeding. Rivers have been granted rights, such as the right to flow (so much for flood control and hydroelectricity projects). Glaciers have been granted rights. A mountain in New Zealand has rights. The waves in a Spanish bay have rights. Copper mining was stopped in Panama because of the supposed right of the earth to keep its own ore. In the U.S., Canada, and the UK, various municipalities have granted rights to nature, lakes, water, and trees. There is a radical bill pending in the English Parliament to grant rights to nature.

The most recent iteration of this nonsense sees arctic ice as having “agency” and therefore entitled to rights. An academic=journal article started the sea-ice-rights advocacy ball rolling last year. From “Toward Rights of Sea Ice” (citations omitted):

Importantly, RoN hold the potential for the integration of a new ethical approach for Arctic sea ice, providing a promising perspective that emphasizes relationships, interdependence, and the well-being of all entities. The latter may have both conceptual and normative implications on the current legal treatment of Arctic sea ice, both of which may unfold in different manners. Conceptually, the ethics inherently embedded in RoN fosters a nurturing and reciprocal relationship with nature and the more-than-human and thus the Arctic environment as a whole.

“More than human” is a term I first encountered covering advocacy for “glacier rights.” Here is how the sea ice rights article defines the concept, which contains more than a hint of earth worship mysticism:

The term ‘more-than-human’ refers to all entities that exist beyond the realm of human beings, including animals, plants, ecosystems, and even inanimate natural planetary features like water, land, sea ice, and air.⁶³ In other words, it is “it is planetary, elemental, multispecies, multibeing.”

If “more than human” referred merely to non-human aspects of all that exists corporeally, a better term to describe flora, fauna, and geological features would be “other than human.” “More than human” implies being possessed of greater fundamental value, encapsulating the profound misanthropy that is the weight-bearing foundation of the nature rights movement.

The movement is globalist in the extreme and would grant legal personhood to ice.

Harmonizing these concepts with RoN could counter the dominant state-centric perspective on Arctic governance and recognize sea ice’s ontological importance in defining regional relations. Therefore, it’s crucial to weave RoN principles into the existing framework of international law and jurisprudence. Legally reconceptualising sea ice through RoN could thus mean to acknowledge its legal personality and normatively act accordingly. This integration would redefine the current legal understanding of sea ice through a RoN lens and mitigate the necessity for a new international treaty to fill regulatory gaps . . .

The framework would advocate for Arctic sea ice and its associated constituents, including the water beneath, and the life it hosts, to be recognized as legal entities with rights and agency that exist as complex entities.

Ice has no agency. It is frozen water. Water contains minerals and other elements. Do they have rights, too? Ocean creatures and plants are alive, to be sure, but none have “agency.” They are either non-sentient or entirely amoral. Good grief, a crab cannot be held morally responsible for anything. It is a crab!

So what are the supposed rights of Arctic sea ice?

In practical terms, recognizing the rights of Arctic sea ice, including the right to exist, thrive, and be restored, could therefore provide conceptual clarity to the Article 234 provision, acknowledging the value of sea ice for Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, and the integrity of sea ice as a liminal materiality that extends across maritime zones.

Does that mean we should take steps — impossible, I know — to prevent the spring and summer ice melt? If not, why not? Does only some of the ice have a right to exist and thrive, or does all of it? And if the Arctic ice pack shrinks, how would we “restore” it?

These proposed rights give up the game that is afoot. The RoN scam is about harnessing fears about climate change as an excuse to corrode human exceptionalism and destroy free-market economic systems. If Arctic ice is a person “with the rights to exist, thrive, and be restored,” then its “guardians” — environmental fanatics for sure — would happily sue fossil fuel industries and cattle ranches (to just name two prime targets) for causing warming that reduces the ice pack. Oh, the nonhumanity!

Let’s look a little deeper into the irrationality of RoN advocacy that would grant rights to sea ice. The Arctic Institute just published a piece on its website about “the overarching agency of ice over a sailboat’s voyage of the Northwest Passage,” written by a University of Helsinki professor. I am sure the topography was awe-inspiring (an emotion only humans possess). But that isn’t the point of the article. Catch this. From “Thinking with Ice“:

Actors with agency are capable of changing and surprising, and that ice certainly does. Ice doesn’t necessarily behave the way one would assume; it doesn’t develop linearly…Ice isn’t static; it moves with the wind, with currents, and often follows the landforms of the shore and the seabed. Ice is vital and participates actively in how it is understood…

When travelling the route with a sailboat, ice truly dictates everything, and its agency becomes tangible. When we could sail, to where and how fast, were all questions we didn’t have that much to say ourselves, as it was the ice in the form of the ice charts, satellite images and our visual observation, that had the agency to decide those things…

At the beginning of September, we completed the voyage as the 410th boat in the history of recorded transits.¹⁵⁾ We set our anchor outside the picturesque town of Qeqertarsuaq, in Kalaallit Nunaat.

Ice let us through.

Good grief. Ice doesn’t “behave” in the sense of possessing agency. Of course, it moves with the wind and currents, but passively. It does not “participate actively” in any regard in its formations and flow. And while its then present configurations would dictate the safest passages to sail through — as determined by true persons, i.e., humans and the navigational instruments we invented — such strategies wouldn’t be because of anything volitional by the frozen water. The ice no more “let” the boat “through” than the infamous iceberg that sank the Titanic murdered its passengers.

It’s easy to laugh and roll our eyes at the blatant anthropomorphizing and mystification of nature by increasingly radical and anti-human environmentalists. But we should take this threat seriously.

With the globalist political establishment, the scientific intelligentsia including science and medical journals, prestigious universities, mainstream NGOs such as the National Geographic Society, and progressive political activists like Jim Hightower and the Florida Democratic Party increasingly embracing nature rights, the time for complacency about this dangerous movement is over.