One-Dimensional Law: A Critique of the Human Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment

This article uses Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man as a framework to analyse the limits of a key development of human rights law in relation to climate change: the General Assembly’s adoption of a human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a raw critique of late industrial society that identifies two underlying forces perpetuating capitalism: ‘positivism’ as the predominant form of thought that focuses exclusively on measuring observable phenomena while concealing the forces that make this universe; and ‘containment’, that is, the system’s ability to reduce external challenges to its own terms. The article argues that the right to a healthy, clean and sustainable environment is a manifestation of the one-dimensional cosmos of industrial society. The formulation of this human right is highly positivist in that, for example, it identifies a crisis in the climate, rather than in the system, therefore limiting the observable phenomenon away from the actual problem. The unnecessary inclusion of the term ‘sustainable’ as a legal ingredient of the right is a containment strategy that acts as a Trojan horse that positions capitalism as the goal. As a result, this new and heralded human right cannot promise an alternative reality and a direction different to the one that existed before its adoption.