The United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Protect, Respect, and Remedy Framework) were a breakthrough initiative. The Principles have brought considerable business attention to the issue of human rights and provided ways for businesses to begin to begin to be held accountable for egregious violations.

In this short piece, I want to be provocative: to extend thinking about rights that need protecting beyond human beings to the more-than-human world. We in Western and ‘developed’ nations tend towards belief systems that separate humans from nature in the form of what is known as human exceptionalism. That is the belief that humans are exempt from natural constraints that impact other beings and that any problems can be resolved through human ingenuity and technological progress. While patently wrong from whole systems and ecological perspectives, that belief has found its way into today’s dominant form of economics, neoliberalism, which informs how business is practiced. Without explicitly saying so, neoliberalism effectively posits that humans and their businesses have the right to exploit natural resources for monetary gains and continual growth. Both are central (albeit often unstated) values in this form of economics. This approach remains largely the case, despite increasing evidence of polycrisis (multiple interacting, systemic, global crises), an ever-deepening climate emergency, and growing understanding of planetary boundaries or natural limits to exploitive practices with respect to nature, largely resulting from today’s exploitive business practices (and human population growth).

In light of these issues, many observers, ranging from business friendly entities like the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and World Bank Group to intergovernmental panels like the IPCC on climate heating and IPBES on species loss, are calling for transformative system change. Looking at these reports, a clear call for transformation of business and the associated economic system accompanies these calls. The underlying idea is to move towards wellbeing economies (e.g., through shifting to new economic framings like Doughnut Economics, buen vivir, ecological economics, or an economics of care, to name a few alternatives). Other progressives call for incorporating Indigenous worldviews and wisdom into how we think about the world.

One thing that clearly needs to change is the narrative of human exceptionalism.. Some years ago I argued for a Gaia-centric perspective on stakeholder theory. The position was that we humans typically view ourselves as (various types of) stakeholders to businesses (and other types of organizations). But if we took an actual whole systems-based perspective and really looked at and understood the relevant relationships, we might in fact place the whole Earth, conceived as the living entity Gaia, at the center of stakeholder theory—not businesses and certainly not economics. In fact, if we took a relational and systemic perspective based on understanding our actual human places in the whole Earth system, that would be more akin to Indigenous perspectives that recognize the inter-relationality, interconnectedness, and interdependence of all beings and of the lands from which they come. That understanding is sometimes formulated as the Lakota expression, Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ, or ‘all my relations’, recognizing that humans are part of an interconnected web of life, as physicist Fritjof Capra framed it.

Here I want to make an argument for  broadening beyond ‘human’ rights to encompass the manifold ‘more-than-human’ beings found in nature, whose dignity, intrinsic value, and ‘right’ not to be exploited are too frequently violated. That is, there is a growing need to recognize the rights of natural beings to be treated with dignity, as if they have inherent worth, simply because they exist. Yes, of course, to survive, humans have to use some of nature’s bounty, however, the issue here is how that bounty is used—or sometimes abused. Shifting the narrative to place humans in the context of nature would go a long way towards needed transformation.

Taking such a perspective would mean understanding the world itself and all its beings as living entities. Indeed, environmentalist James Lovelock has called the Earth ‘Gaia’ to recognize her holistically and systemically as a living being. Such a perspective on the rights of nature would mean acknowledging that all living beings have their own worth and should be treated with dignity. This notion is an eco-centric rather than a human-centric perspective. It certainly goes beyond the business- (or economics-) centric perspective that is too often prevalent in management thinking. It is realistic, in accord with much emerging science as well as Indigenous wisdom, and it places humans, somewhat more humbly than conventionally, into their actual place as part of, not exempt from, the world. While the current human rights guidelines rightly focus on changing business practice, it may also be time to think about broadening their purview to encompass other living beings.

Read a related article from Business and Human Rights Journal, “Human Rights Violations Connected with Deforestation – Emerging and Diverging Approaches to Human Rights Due Diligence.”