One-dimensional law: a critique of the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment

This article argues that the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment preserves the one-dimensional nature of industrial society, where capitalism serves as both the backdrop and the ultimate goal, as critiqued in Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse's work dissects late industrial society, identifying two forces that sustain capitalism: 'positivism', the reduction of thought to observable phenomena while ignoring the systemic forces at play; and 'containment', the system's capacity to absorb external challenges by reducing them to the terms of its own logic. The article contends that this new right is one-dimensional, that is, coextensive with the status quo, for two reasons. First, it embodies positivism by focusing on environmental degradation as an isolated issue, diverting attention from its structural causes. Second, it employs a containment strategy through the unnecessary inclusion of 'sustainable' as a legal qualifier, which acts as a Trojan horse embedding capitalism as the system to uphold. Therefore, the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is incapable of yielding a reality different from the one that existed before its adoption.