Why doesn’t the law care about more-than-human future generations?
To address the global environmental crisis, laws protecting the rights of future generations must consider the future of nonhuman beings.
The idea that the environment must be protected for the sake of future generations has gained popularity in recent years thanks to increasing climate litigation and youth activism. Like most environmental laws, laws addressing the rights of future generations focus only on humans. However, they need to protect the more-than-human world as well, including future generations of nonhuman animals and the environment itself.
Both international and domestic laws promote the protection of the environment for future generations. The concept has been invoked repeatedly in international, regional, and domestic courts worldwide. However, a deep anthropocentric bias means that the future generations in question are always understood as future generations of humans alone. Such a model is inadequate. Its “species chauvinism” excludes nonhuman animals and promotes a hierarchy of the human over the nonhuman, thus reinforcing the very problem it seeks to resolve. International law itself is part of the current environmental crisis, as its anthropocentric underpinnings work to prioritize human interests—primarily economic interests—over environmental and nonhuman needs. If the concept of future generations is to help construct a more equitable and just future, one that adequately addresses environmental concerns, it must do so beyond the constraints of anthropocentric thought.
[…] a deep anthropocentric bias means that the future generations in question are always understood as future generations of humans alone. Such a model is inadequate.
Many Indigenous peoples centered a concept of future generations in their thought long before it came to prominence in international law and continue to do so today. Indigenous conceptualizations of future generations, however, radically differ from those that dominate international law, and they provide alternative and less anthropocentric ways of thinking.
For example, Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand have a strong understanding of connection over time, making decisions based on “the likely impact on the “‘mokopuna’s mokopuna’— literally four generations hence, but encompassing all future descendants.” Similarly, members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois) of North America, have long centered the seventh-generation principle, which considers seven generations to come in decision-making. The Constitution of the Iroquois Nations (established between five and nine hundred years ago) states, for example, “Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground—the unborn of the future Nation.” Many Indigenous conceptions of future generations escape anthropocentrism. For example, the Māori concept of whakapapa (broadly, genealogy), which centers the connections between people and land and people, place, and space, extends into the human and nonhuman world. In short, a Māori worldview clearly views protection for future generations as including protection for nonhumans.
Can the legal concept of future generations be decolonized through Indigenous thought? Māori environmental scholar Christine Jill Winter has already begun to explore this question. She asks what happens when future generations are understood, “not in competitive sequences, but synchronically.” Through such an understanding, past, present, and future generations, including nonhuman elements, work to dissolve the boundaries of the “I.” Winter notes how the minerals of the land are in her bones, “drawn from the volcanic soils of Taranaki in which my father grew our fruit and vegetables.”
By centering human and nonhuman connections and refusing the division between the organic and the inorganic, Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) inherently displaces anthropocentric conceptualizations of future generations, instead centering relationships among all kinds of kin and beyond blood ties. In this model, humans are only one part of the future and may not be the future at all. Rather, Mātauranga Māori creates responsibilities toward all future beings, from humans to bacteria, plants, birds, whales, and rocks.
There have been some attempts to dislodge the anthropocentrism of the concept of future generations in law. Almost all these examples come from the Americas. In 2017, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights linked the right to a healthy environment to both the rights of future generations and the rights of nature. However, it did so separately—meaning it did not argue that the rights of future generations included the rights of the more -than-human. Despite this, it seems as though the court is not far from making such a connection; recently, the court recognized the rights of nature more explicitly in its latest judgement on climate change made on July 3, 2025.
If it is to match the demands of the future, the concept of future generations needs to be defined and applied in a way that also accounts for the nonhuman future
However, a case coming out of Colombia in 2018 did, explicitly note that nonhumans should be included in future generations. Here, twenty-five young people, aged seven to twenty-five, sued various Colombian governmental bodies operating in the Amazon rainforest for violating environmental agreements and their human rights. They argued that their rights to food, to a healthy environment, and to water were impinged by the harms they will suffer from climate change as adults and in their older age. The Supreme Court of Justice ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, recognizing, for the first time, the Colombian Amazon as a being that itself has rights. The Court ordered the creation of an “intergenerational pact for the life of the Colombian Amazon,” that would promote measures to reduce and eventually stop deforestation. The Court stated: “The scope of protection of fundamental rights is not only the individual, but also the other . . . the other people who inhabit the planet, other animals and plants . . . but, also, it includes those not yet born, who also deserve to enjoy the same environmental living conditions as we do.”
It is interesting that these cases come from the Americas; Europe is far behind in recognizing the legal rights of more-than-human entities. This is no surprise, however, given the role Indigenous peoples played in the aforementioned cases, with many Indigenous groups strongly centering human and more-than-human connections.
Outside of these cases, the idea of future generations still generally focuses on future generations of humans alone. If it is to match the demands of the future, the concept of future generations needs to be defined and applied in a way that also accounts for the nonhuman future. After all, this is about saving us all, now and in the future, young and old, human and nonhuman.
This piece is based on research in a recent article written by Dr Jones and published in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. To access that full article for free, please click here.
