The United Nations People's Convention of 1975, included the "right to environment" in its list of human rights. The right to environment occupies a pretty unique place in the category of human rights.

Environmental rights let people around the world live in their culturally specific, traditional ways, and utilize the earth's resources. In a more primary way, many people around the world are beginning to acknowledge the very simple link that these two concepts have. Without a clean and healthy environment, human life as we know it, in fact life at all, is not possible.

Human rights create a kind of "fence" around each person in the world. The area inside the fence is made up of the needs and freedoms of every person to live to their fullest potential. Ideally, whatever a person's gender, race, income level, or talents are, we all have the same "fenced off" area. In the real world, of course, these fences are complicated, and are not strict. All countries in the world have some sort of basic outlines of rights for their people, and in all countries in the world, these fences are crossed.

The human rights fence defines what actions can and cannot be taken against a person. Take the right to free speech for example. Not all countries have the right to free speech, in fact many do not. Free speech allows people to say things they believe.This is a freedom within their "fence." However, every freedom has limits. Consider the scenario in which someone is attacking a race of people. Say it goes to the point that their "speech" is a call for others to incite violence against people of that race. This threatening speech, goes outside of a person's "fence." In Canada, no-one is free to do this.

With environmental rights, each individual's "fence" holds in it a minimum level of fresh water, clean air, space to live, and resources to use as shelter, for creating income. Also, it holds the freedom to live in a community that is unpolluted and safe. These are needs each of us has in order for our lives to be safe, and to ensure that each individual can live up to his or her potential. Consider the "right" to clean water. If a government, an industry, or another individual pollutes the water inside your fence for example, your life is threatened. Not only is the way you live threatened, but your very life itself.

Some suggest that this relationship between different human rights and the environment is like a pyramid. Imagine that on the bottom is the right to clean water and air. If you can't access clean water, and become sick, then the right to free speech, to free movement, and to things like freedom of religion become irrelevant. Without basic health, you cannot act to your fullest potential in using your rights. Environmental rights are on the bottom of complicated pyramid, which can collapse without them.

There are many real life examples of people whose lives are limited by a lack of human rights, and a basic lack of a clean environment to live in. Goodluck Diigbo is someone whose life has truly been limited by these circumstances. Diigbo is a political refugee in the United States. He brought the case of the Ogoni people of Nigeria and their fight with large oil companies and the Nigerian government to the UN Human Rights tribunal.

The Ogoni peoples' territory is exploited by oil companies, and the resulting pollution of their homeland makes lives insufferable. The Ogoni people were silenced with arrests and executions when they tried to speak out against the government and industry in 1995. The Ogoni people felt that in order to change the use of the land around them they needed the freedom to take part in the decision making processes in their country.

"Without the right to environment, the right to life is useless, the right to freedom is useless, and the right to movement and to equal respect for all people before the law, are all useless," Diigbo told TG. The Ogoni people, and Diigbo himself, are an example of a group of individuals in the world whose human rights are denied by, and because of, the destruction of their environment. Diigbo now works in New York to try to raise awareness about his peoples' struggle for the right to environment, and to certain human rights.

Each time we walk outside, breath clean air, or drink fresh water we are exercising our right as humans to a clean environment. Each time we speak out about how we feel about the environment, and how we want it preserved we are utilizing a right that to many is only a dream.