Finally, the projection of persona, spirit, or rights upon anything other than citizens is little more than a twisted democratic power play. It is a claim of an exclusive franchise to represent an artifi-cial constituency. Maybe those plants do need protection; but who gets to decide by what means, and to what end?SourceA biocentric perspective projects the spirituality of being into everything. To a deep ecologist, a rock would have a rock’s spirit, a rock’s consciousness, and thus deserves civil rights equivalent to human beings, which they alone purport to represent.
This is a debilitating thing to do to one’s own mind, much less to a republic. To claim to represent the rights of rocks is to project a subjective human impression of a rock’s preferences onto rocks. What if they were wrong? Perhaps the rocks might feel more appreciated by a mineral geologist who would want to make aluminum cans out of them? Did anybody ask the rocks? You guess.
When activists of any stripe demand rights for animals, rocks, or plants, what they are really doing is demanding disproportionate representation of their interests as the self-appointed advocates representing those constituents. Unfortunately, to enforce a right requires the police power of government, the only agent so capable. Government acquires this role because it is assumed a disinter-ested arbiter of competing claims.
History suggests the opposite, which is why limiting the number of enforceable rights is as important to securing the blessings of liberty as is constituting them as unalienable.
When government gains the power to confer rights to any constituency, it acquires the means to confer power upon itself as an enforcing agent. There is then no limit to the power to dilute the rights of citizens. Civic respect for unalienable rights of citizens then exists not at all.