If everything has rights — trees, geological features, animals, waves (yes, waves!) — then the core principle protecting human liberty becomes as worthless as currency during a wild inflation. Now, illustrating the Luddite sensibilities that permeate environmentalism generally and the nature rights movement specifically, a science journal has published advocacy by three astrobiology “ethicists” urging that planets, moons, and even space microbes be granted rights.

The authors are earnestly serious about their subject. They expend thousands of words discussing the history of the rights of nature movement and existing treaties that apply to space exploration. They then argue that planets be deemed juridical entities, a proposal that environmental radicals have previously urged apply to the moon, i.e., “the right to be defined as a self-sustaining, intelligent, cohesive, intact lunar ecosystem, beyond current human comprehension.” (See what I mean by irrational?)

Science Direct:

Recent legal scholarship and advocacy efforts have begun to extend the boundaries of environmental personhood beyond Earth’s orbit to celestial bodies. Altabef, for instance, explores how juridical personhood might be attributed to celestial bodies as a means of securing standing for environmental litigation under existing international legal frameworks. . . . Specifically, he suggests that a UN body could apply to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion as to whether the term juridical person applies to celestial bodies. [Citations omitted.]

The authors analogize to current nature rights policies that have already been applied by courts in nations with nature rights laws to prevent copper mining and other harnessing of natural resources, no matter how responsibly conducted:

If legal personhood and standing can be granted to rivers or ecosystems on the basis of their intrinsic value and vulnerability to human interference, then it is worth asking whether a similar legal imagination might apply to extraterrestrial ecosystems. The core insight is transferable: that legal subjectivity need not depend on intelligence or agency, but on a community’s capacity and willingness to recognise moral relevance where law has previously remained silent. Applied to the context of space governance, this raises a critical question: if we are prepared to construct guardianship models for protecting rivers on Earth, why not for ecosystems beyond it?

The authors do not argue that all space exploration stop, but that we “think before we take the next giant leap for humankind in solar system exploration.” Sure. But since the authors apply the precautionary principle to the issue, the ultimate purpose in granting rights to space microbes and planets would be to disincentivize investments in space exploration and keep us Gaia-bound:

We propose extending an ecosystem model, similar to that of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), into space governance. The experience of the Rights of Nature movement demonstrates the critical contribution of civil society in recognizing and safeguarding the intrinsic value of ecosystems. Environmental advocacy groups should be encouraged to engage with the concept of outer space as ‘environment’ and to liaise with international bodies like COSPAR and COPUOS to ensure that environmental protection becomes a foundational part of space exploration. Indigenous communities, whose epistemologies recognise the intrinsic value of nonhuman life, should also be given a stronger voice in shaping space governance norms.

As we have seen in other contexts, applying the “wisdom” of indigenous people would apply pre-industrial sensibilities to modernistic resource development.

Perhaps this is a job for Elon Musk. If these people get their way, he will never be allowed to land and die on Mars.