and territories (the global North), against specific populations and ecosystems (the global South).
In most of the debates, speeches and arguments presented by those who suffer the negative impacts of environmental conflict require the recognition of constitutional or legal limits, both natural and cultural to access nature, as well as the respect, protection and promotion of care for cultural and natural diversity that are part of the essence of the Colombian nation and most of the Latin American countries. This goes against of the classical liberal vision of the Nation State, which is homogeneous natural and culturally speaking, and was promoted by the Eurocentric vision of the world.
Likewise, the ideas of clarification of truth, justice, reparation and guarantee of non-repetition of damages and adverse environmental impacts are demanded. Even during the peace negotiations with armed guerrilla groups, mechanisms have been defined to clarify the historical truth about what kind of projects and who have dealt with the deterioration and environmental damage, in what territories, at what time, their duration and who were affected (Mesa Cuadros, 2015c).
Justice is demanded to investigate the facts and actions to punish those responsible for crimes against the environment and to compensate victims (both individual and collective human and non-human, including various elements of nature). Negative environmental impacts and unrepaired environmental liabilities can take many decades to resolve. We must remember that in New Zealand and India in 2016, legislator and judges, respectively, have recognized rights of Nature and rights of some elements of it.
In any case, the fact of signing the peace accords with the FARC guerrillas, carried out last year, and those currently underway with the ELN is no guarantee that the environmental conflict will be solved. The State and companies have been pushing for a series of normative changes that are further eroded by the low environmental standards of Colombian regulations, an aspect that together with the inefficiency of our environmental regulations makes environmental protection more difficult in periods of peace, and during the war was carried to extreme degrees of deterioration and contamination.
Finally, and as a synthesis of the first part of this paper, it is necessary to have an adequate conceptualization and foundation of environmental conflict. We must take into account the context in which these conflicts originate, their specific causes and their consequences, both the ecosystems and the populations affected and the mechanisms for protecting the rights effectively and the corresponding reparations for violated or denied rights, all in an integral, global and systemic way, that is, our environmental perspective.
SOME THEORIES ABOUT RIGHTS, BEYOND LIBERALISM
In this second part of this text, we will dialogue about the concept and the basis to justify the need to formulate a new theory of rights that seeks to overcome the deficiency of materialization and effective protection of the same, subject that will be approached from our theory on environmental rights and environmental justice.
Concept and basis of rights
Theories, history and practice of human rights contain a series of concepts, foundations, justification and legitimacy of the same, regarding their existence, permanence or disappearance, where human beings, mainly from the academy, produce reasons and arguments to specify, expand, reduce and interpret what we call rights.
Since scholars have been researching on this topic for more than 20 years, it is imperative that we specify its content from the university, because rights can be understood not only as norms or as attributes of humans, but also as a dynamic set of social and cultural action-reactions arising from concrete contexts of relations between humans and their environment, in two great dimensions, their universalization and specification, not only for a few humans but for all of them and other beings.
As Ferrajoli (1999) points out, rights are nothing more than socially shared meanings and as such do not fall from the sky nor affirm in a day but are the result of long processes through which their normative statements are sedimentary in the collective conscience and, above all, those of the victims of their violations.
These rights incorporate principles, rules and diverse forms of articulation of individual and collective actions as a result of social, economic, cultural and political processes in defense of environmental (human and ecosystemic) dignity, with the occasion of the existence of environmental conflict in a specific place.
Theories of law that have been constructed to speak of rights, guarantees, freedoms or faculties in the heads of a few, many or all human beings are diverse, but in the last decades, the idea of the need for extending the scope of protection of subjects to other beings, beyond just human beings.
Most of these theories emphasize the human, and specifically on the interest of a few humans so that rhetorically formally state in normative political-juridical discourses, the idea that these rights belong to everyone.
Such theories range from the most restrictive androcentrism to the generalization or universalization of liberal rhetoric that all humans are subjects of law, going through the various anthropocentric theories that emphasize, more or less, who are or are not subjects of law, from when and how many rights can be had and by what political-legal mechanisms can be obtained.
Within the main theories of rights in the last two centuries against the abstract Universalist theories promoted by modern liberal thought, we have, among others, the Iusrealist, Marxist, republicanism, feminism, communitarian, multiculturalist, interculturalist and decolonial theories. They try to respond to the deficit of material protection of what we have called rights, but they suffer, in one way or another, from broad and compressive contents of the globality of the dynamics of the human relationship with each other, with other cultures and with ecosystems and the environment in general.
In the last two decades in South America, particularly in Ecuador and Bolivia, the debate on rights beyond human beings has become more dynamic. As Indigenous Peoples and societies are considered the majority in those countries, they have introduced in their beliefs a strong connection to the environment. For example, the idea of buen vivir or “good living”, Pacha Mama or “Mother Earth”, are approaches that recognize the environmental dignity. It is expressed in that is the representation of Mother, Master and Holy and allowed in their respective Political Constitutions. Therefore, we have with it a duty of special care, because human life and other beings depend on how well we preserve the environment in the present and the future.
From our perspective, and taking into account our academic and research processes (Mesa Cuadros, 2015d), both the University and various ethnic and traditional peoples, as well as peasant and marginalized urban communities, which have usually been subjected to environmental displacement, have expressed a persistent desire of recognition of the rights of Nature, ecosystems, animals and other beings that are in them.
Such a legal basis is expressed in specifying who is precisely responsible for generating environmental problems and conflicts by unjustified appropriation of the environment and impacts on ecosystems and cultures, as this defines the degree of responsibility for actions or omissions of States, corporations or human beings as individuals.
For that reason, this legal basis has in the principles of responsibility, solidarity, sustainability and environmental prevention, the four pillars for the search and concretion of environmental justice. It passes through a discipline of Environmental Law that emphasizes in new principles and new political and legal procedures different from those that currently exist. However, these privileges only a few human beings with power and forgets the rights and interests of those who do not have power, because they are not yet subject, or because they are not materially part of the existing moral community.
This is because a debate about responsibility must show its multiple
