The Right to a Healthy Environment

David Boyd is one of the world’s leading experts on human rights and the environment. From the comprehensive prescription in his book Unnatural Law to the visionary blueprint Sustainability Within a Generation and now this book on the constitutional right to a healthy environment, he keeps producing compelling solutions for Canada’s environmental woes. Given that humans are wholly dependent on ecosystems to provide air, water, food, and essential services such as pollination, it is simply common sense to include environmental rights and responsibilities in our highest law. As Boyd concludes, if over 100 other countries can do this, why can’t we?

Renowned environmental lawyer David R. Boyd argues that Canada must constitutionalize environmental rights and responsibilities if it hopes to improve its environmental record.

Canada has abundant natural wealth -- beautiful landscapes, vast forests, and thousands of rivers and lakes. The land defines Canadians as a people, yet the country has one of the worst environmental records in the industrialized world.

Building on his previous book, The Environmental Rights Revolution (2012), David R. Boyd, one of Canada’s leading environmental lawyers, describes how recognizing the constitutional right to a healthy environment could have a transformative impact by empowering citizens, holding governments and industry accountable, and improving Canada’s green record. The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations now recognize environmental rights through laws, constitutions, treaties, or court decisions. Boyd explores Canada’s history of failed efforts to do the same within this international context and offers three pathways to constitutional recognition of the right to a healthy environment.

This important and provocative book provides a blueprint for renewed leadership in protecting human health, the well-being of the planet, and the interests of future generations.