Are Human Rights Enough? – Extending Hre Frameworks through Ecopedagogical Perspectives

What if humans learned to listen to Earth? What if we learned to understand Earth? Would there be emergency summits on supranational levels, like the UN, to address the urgent need for world-Earth de-distancing? Would there be adjustments to long-standing, yet in their orientation almost unquestioningly anthropocentric frameworks, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to accommodate Earth’s rights as a fellow citizen?

Applying ecopedagogical and posthumanist lenses, this conceptual paper argues that Earth’s rights are integral to human rights (HR) discourses because the tackling of social issues and environmental injustices is not a contradiction, not an either/or-decision – the two dimensions are inseparably linked (Smith/Pangsapa 2008: 1). Ecopedagogies, grounded in criticality and the work of Paulo Freire, are based on the inherent connections between environmental violence and social injustices that are essential for critical global citizenship education (GCE), and vice-versa (Misiaszek 2020). Ecopedagogical widening to planetary citizenship holistically reinvents citizenship for all of Earth, beyond humans (Misiaszek 2022). Our presentation will ecopedagogically unpack the contested terrains of needs, possibilities, and challenges of HR founded upon humanization with Earth’s rights’ from expanded planetary views, including (re)constructions of citizenships (local-to-planetary citizenship spheres).

To do so, we will proceed in three steps. First, we unpack what Torres (2023) calls ‘elective affinities’ – a relationship of mutual reinforcement – between concepts such as human rights and their education, global citizenship and its education, and ecopedagogy. Then, we apply critical ecopedagogical and posthumanist lenses to existing HR frameworks, such as the Revised 1974 recommendation (UNESCO 2024), to identify and discuss possibilities, challenges, and contested terrains vis-à-vis Earth’s rights. Finally, we call for bottom-up learning for world-Earth de-distancing and the expansion of the human rights framework to include more than human rights, using examples from education praxis for illustration how it might be done.