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This text begins with the recognition that continued practical denial of the human rights of children globally is due to the absence of any theoretical foundation justifying such rights. The goal of this book is to provide that foundation, which will depart from the eighteenth-century rationalist justification for human rights generally and provide a new conceptualization that embraces the facts of human vulnerability and capacity for promising as the real basis for all human rights. As such, children also qualify for full human rights, including to a safe environment; to dignity; and to full participation as citizens, including voting rights.

This book presents an argument for environmental human rights as the basis of intergenerational environmental justice. It argues that the rights to clean air, water, and soil should be seen as the environmental human rights of both present and future generations. It presents several new conceptualizations central to the development of theories of both human rights and justice, including emergent human rights, reflexive reciprocity as the foundation of justice, and a communitarian foundation for human rights that both protects the rights of future generations and makes possible an international consensus on human rights, beginning with environmental human rights. In the process of making the case for environmental human rights, the book surveys and contributes to the entire fields of human rights theory and environmental justice

ABSTRACT: Since the time of Augustine, and continuing today, it is common for religious believers to say that humans are created in the "image of God." This imago dei idea was also commonly invoked, beginning in the seventeenth century, by Liberal theorists like Locke and Jefferson, as the foundation for natural or human rights. In this article, I will argue that for centuries, the dominant interpretations of imago dei were used by religious philosophical and political leaders to deny rights to both women and non-white men. More centrally to my thesis, this theological idea is still invoked today to deny human rights to children. However, taking children's human rights seriously offers both a new foundation for human rights generally, and a different interpretation of what it means for humans to reflect the divine image.

As global supplies diminish and climate change threatens future supplies even more, water as a human right has received increasing attention among human rights scholars and in international commissions and agreements. In this article, the author argues that the right to water should be recognized as a basic right in and of itself, not merely as a component of the right to development or to a healthy life. The right to water, described both substantively and procedurally, is an "emergent" right that uniquely connects present and future generations into a relationship of justice involving reciprocity. As such, the human right to water needs to be not only a part of international politics and law, but must also percolate down to the local level in specific policy decisions regarding land use, zoning, and development. It is time for human rights to return to those "small places, close to home" where Eleanor Roosevelt famously claimed that they invariably originate. A primary example is the local regulation of golf courses, especially in light of their profligate water usage. A golf course's impact on neighboring communities and, by implication, on a global water system is, therefore, a legitimate focus of human rights litigation and advocacy.