Environmental justice across generations, it turns out, can be pursued only within the political context of constitutionalism and participatory democracy. Only in that political environment can substantive and procedural environmental human rights be protected and guaranteed for future as well as present generations of citizens, and it is citizens we speak of here, not simply all human beings. As we have seen, as opposed to altruism or even general moral duty, justice requires political identities – citizens of individual nations who recognize in each other and in the imagined faces of generations of their own future citizens a shared obligation to preserve their environment as part of a duty to maintain their own authenticity or group identity. All humans therefore possess environmental rights as (and only as) citizens of their own transgenerational national communities.

In her recent history of human rights, Lynn Hunt (2007, 27) disputes this conclusion, arguing that national identity alone cannot provide what she calls the necessary “disposition toward other people” and “set of convictions about what people are like” that together form the basis of both human rights and justice. For her, that disposition and set of convictions are what make human empathy possible, and as the foundation of human rights, empathy is both necessary and more intimate than shared national identity.