From Environmental Law to the Rights of Nature: challenges in Ecuador (Review).

Abstract

International environmental law has been making its way within different nations, for this reason it has created countless laws, ordinances, principles, but these same principles present an apparent contradiction, because it says that states have sovereign rights over their resources, that is, they can use their resources as they see fit. At the same time comes the contradiction that says that states should not harm the environment, although at the beginning it said that the state parties have total sovereignty over their natural resources, because of those contradictions already mentioned, a new concept began to be created about what which is the control of nature, coming to shed light on what ecocentrism is, which is very distant from the concepts of anthropocentrism. The main difference between environmental law and natural law is their perspective of what the environment and its resources are. While environmental law defines that a healthy and balanced environment must be provided for human beings, since it makes full reference to the fact that nature serves man and is subjugated to him, natural law seeks to guarantee the rights of nature and its resources, that is, it no longer leaves the human being as the center of everything, it gives its place to the environment and removes that reasoning that man is superior to nature, granting a position of respect to the environment.