On March 6th 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) of the International Union of Geological Sciences rejected the proposal for the recognition of the start of the Anthropocene as the contemporary geologic epoch. According to the technical committee, the proposal did not meet the required scientific geologic criteria. If the Subcomission had voted otherwise, the recognition of the Anthropocene would have had important impacts in society: it would formalize the idea that the impact of human action in recent decades has been so great that it has transformed the biogeochemical conditions of the earth. This would strengthen the legitimacy of the Anthropocene within the scientific community and the public opinion.

Climate change activists and intellectuals have expressed their disappointment with the SQS’ decision, among them the Brazilian indigenous activist Ailton Krenak and the Brazilian Climatologist Carlos Nobre. According to them, the scientific committee’s attachment to long-established technical criteria alienates it from the material reality and risks posed by climate change on the existence of human and non-human life in Earth. Considering this dissonance between the SQS’ decision and reality, Krenak argues that the Climate Crisis is in fact an epistemological crisis, one that demands the recognition of other knowledges and perspectives to effectively face and prevent the dangerous risks of climate change.

Amid this Climate Epistemological Crisis, the recently recognized right to healthy environment can work as an alternative human rights answer to the existential challenges of the Anthropocene, challenging the technocratic and anthropocentric rationality of the hegemonic scientificized perspective on Climate Change. This is argued not only in relation to its scope but also due to the innovative manner through which this right was formalized into the international human rights system, providing a new rights epistemology capable of producing and conceiving human rights for the Anthropocene.

Recognized by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2021 and by the UN General Assembly, in July 2022, the right to a healthy environment contains a holistic notion of justice in which the environment degradation entails the violation of both civil rights and socioeconomic rights, in an individual and collective dimension. At the same time, the effective realization of these rights is vital to the protection of environment and the achievement of a sustainable environment. By recognizing the mutual relationship between individuals and the environment, the right to a healthy environment reintegrates the human and nature overcoming the anthropocentric logic of traditional human rights and the Modern imaginary. Moreover, as Alston puts it, by unveiling the collective impact of environment protection on both civil and socioeconomic rights, it reaffirms the interdependency and indivisibility of human rights. Doing so, it breaks with the individualistic and dualistic rationality of the 20th century conception of rights institutionalized in international law, bringing up a rights discourse with a potential to address the structural intergenerational challenges brought by the Anthropocene.

Equally important, the historical process of making and formalizing the right to a healthy environment provides a democratic and communitarian way of making rights that breaks with the universalism of the state and Global North-centric positivization procedure that has long been adopted by the international human rights system. Deeply rooted in the Global South experience, where regional and national systems had already recognized its existence and subalternized communities had long emphasized its relevance, the right to a healthy environment’s recognition was the result of a collective community effort to transpose the Global South normative production into the international arena. To this purpose, met with initial resistance from the hegemonic Global North countries, instead of following the path of treaty-based formal lawmaking in international law, the advocates of the right to healthy environment sought to overcome the initial impermeability by mobilizing states in the more democratic arenas of the UN system. This mobilization was led by a global coalition of more than 1350 civil society organizations, which acted in cooperation with key states to successfully sensibilize the UN General Assembly into universally recognizing the right to a healthy environment.

As a result of this bottom-up communitarian lawmaking process, the right to a healthy environment was formalized into an open-ended concept which maintains an integrative and collective human rights core but still offers space to a continuity and flexibility of the interpretative process. This characteristic allows for a pluriversal and community-based creative dialogue to face and adapt to the collective challenges posed by climate change to human and environmental existence, making the right to a healthy environment a possible response to the Climate Epistemological Crisis of the Anthropocene.