Declaration on Ecological Human Rights in the Digital Age

Preamble

A new form of extraction is emerging, one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and every nook and cranny inside the human psyche. Capitalism requires an ever-expanding terrain to extract resources from in order to create a surplus. As humans, our relationship with our environment–our ecology–is worth strengthening and protecting. Humans impact the health of ecosystems around the physical world as well as the digital world. As humans we have evolving physical ecology as well as digital ecology. And for a while now, our digital ecology has been eroding the Earth’s ecology.

Ancient cultures in Tibet, Greece, and India referred to earth, air, fire, and water, as the building blocks of everything visible and tangible. These elements, which came to be known as the classical elements, were imbued with cosmological qualities that became archetypes upon which many belief systems were built. Many of these archetypes came to be understood through the elements’ physical qualities: Fire chemically alters substances it burns. It initiates processes. Water bonds things together and takes the shape of its container. Air does too but in a different way, by expanding like a gas. Earth is solid matter and won’t change shape like the two fluid elements.

In this declaration on ecological human rights in the digital age, we adapted the four classical elements to organize four articles of human rights with respect to ecology in the digital age. The elements in this document are used to organize the sections and scaffold the cosmic scope of issues relating to ecology in the task of digitizing human rights.

Earth concerns itself with materiality, solids, and physical byproducts. In the realm of digital infrastructure, data is dirt. In the realm of our global logistics system, earth is the packaging, the planes and trucks that deliver packages, and the carbon they emit.

Air rules communications, intelligence, ideas, social and intangible forces. In the realm of our global logistics systems, air is the actual logistics, the wireless connections linking disparate corners of the globe through supply and demand, the organizational superstructures overseeing international freight shipping and financial markets.

Fire is energy, power, transformation, action, reaction, and processes. In our global logistics system, fire represents energy input and output whether that be fossil fuels or more sustainable sources. Fire is also the agency within each of us to use or not use digital platforms.

Water is life, the way things flow, emotions, and waves. Water in our changing climate relates to declining biodiversity and rising sea levels. In the digital world, water is trends, behavioral patterns, and the flow of data and capital from one party to another.

Technology impacts the world in myriad ways. Technology presents opportunities to innovate, to improve lives, to promote ecological sustainability, and to make the world a better place. But technology also has the potential to exacerbate existing problems as well as create new ones. It can be used to threaten safety, security, privacy, the environment, and even the stability of our democracy.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that companies, governments, and individuals alike should all take action and recognize that technology has changed absolutely everything, and we cannot act as if it has not,—That just as technology has transformed the fabric of everyone’s lives, we need to transform our worldview to account for these changes, to recognize and address the harms of the digital age, and to harness the opportunities of the digital age for the better,—That this new digital technology offers tools to help us, but that we cannot see it as a panacea, because it can also be a poison. We have to recognize the role that technology has played in bringing us to this place in history - the unprecedented levels of wealth and standards of living, but also this state of our planet and its impending climate crisis.

Our first primary concern is for preserving and perpetuating the safety, security, and dignity of all people. We want everyone to have the ability to innovate and to pursue economic endeavors. We want them to be able to live lives that are safe, healthy, and dignified. We want their families and their futures to be filled with safety and stability.

Our second primary concern is for the planet on which those people live. We envision a world in which the climate crisis is taken seriously and is addressed from every angle. We envision a world in which people are doing whatever they can to protect the environment and to ensure the future of our planet. We envision a world in which the digital space is one in which people collaborate towards a better world, rather than one in which corporations and politicized organizations create more opportunities to hurt people and the planet. We recognize that while there is a huge overlap, ever-increasing as the world progresses, a digital participant and a general person of the world aren’t synonymous. A digital participant is someone who interacts directly with some sort of digital system and a person is someone who indirectly interacts or doesn’t interact at all and feels the effect of digital systems. A person also encompasses someone who does not experience any effect of digital systems. This document extends rights to digital participants and people generally where it is deemed logical and necessary not to subtract rights from anyone but to ensure proper rights assured.

We see infrastructure and the digitization of public services to work towards this future. The world will continue to transform digitally whether we like it or not. We would like this to be intentional in a way that seeks to maintain democracy and human rights as well as equity, equality, inclusion, sustainability, security, safety, health, dignity, and the pursuit of happiness. We want this path to be intentional in terms of the rights of people and their opportunities to work together toward a world that is fair, efficient and sustainable.

We envision this document as a central reference point that can be referenced by corporations, politicians, organizations, innovators, technologists, engineers, academics, and others with the potential to make lasting change through creating policy or technology that may impact people. Everyone needs to be thinking about their position at this moment in time and how technology is changing the world around them and how their use of technology changes the world and affects others. We know that as students we do not have direct power over any governments, corporations or organizations, but we create this document with the hope that those with the power to change the trajectory of our planet will use these ideas to promote ecological human rights in the digital world and beyond.

It is our belief that a better world and a healthy, safe, and sustainable planet is possible, and it is our aspiration that we inspire those in power to recognize the climate crisis and resolve to prioritize the protection of all people and the environment in order to protect fundamental human rights.

Earth

  1. Digital participants have the right to their personal data, metadata, and residual data. Residual data is information that has been deleted from a computer system but still exists and can be recovered and be used in analysis. There should be residual and meta data landfills to account for user information that's often lost or unaccounted for.
    1. Residual data, sometimes referred to as ambient data is. “Researchers are increasingly gathering ‘real- world’ or ‘in-the-wild’ residual data, obtained from a variety of sources, without the explicit consent of the original owners.”
    2. Similar to how trash is collected and sorted in locations in a logistically sound manner, a residual data landfill would be a place where residual data is collected, stored, and accessible to the public. This landfill could be Google’s or Amazon or Facebook’s own or it could be the public’s. That being said, with such enormous amounts of data, there will need to be many such locations. Insights from this landfill will be made legible to the average person (who may or may not be literate in data science).

  2. Digital participants have the right to relatively equal access to digital infrastructure to engage with the digital world. Digital participants have the right to the tools required to make meaningful connections with each other online.
    1. There should be proper digital infrastructure in everyone's relative close proximity that allows reliable and accessible digital connection. There should not be a great disparity in broadband speeds or other digital metrics. This is to create a relatively equitable digital ecology, where everyone, regardless of means or background, is a piece of our ever-evolving netscape. Diversity and inclusion is necessary to the health of digital ecologies, and as a consequence, the conditions of the digital participant.

  3. Digital participants have a right to an Earth in which technology does not sabotage or betray their right to a clean, healthy, and safe environment. The creation of sustainable digital technologies that do not harm the environment should be prioritized.
    1. Digital products and services should be made in a way that causes minimal harm to the environment. Digital products are some of the most environmentally taxing services and goods to produce and maintain and dispose of.
    2. Digital products should be designed to last a long time and, so that when they are disposed of, they can be recycled to minimize harm to the environment.
    3. The creation of digital solutions to benefit the environment and promote sustainability should be prioritized. An example of where this isn’t happening in the world right now is how green-grabbing and carbon credits are countereffetive. Carbon finance, a system underpinning crypto finance that’s supposedly woke to climate change is responsible for green-grabbing, “where land grabs and dispossession of local communities in the South are justified as side-effects of financialised conservation”
    4. Carbon credits are also flawed in that they don’t limit demand or stop the problem at the source, they simply try to offset it by planting trees. Something important to note is that when a tree is burned, all the carbon it accumulated over its lifetime is released back into the atmosphere. There is no official certification process for the efficacy of carbon offsetting. Companies who want to offset their carbon footprint pay NGOs to take care of it for them and simply use it as a marketing ploy. Many of the trees planted to offset carbon credits are burned for fuel or cut for logging.

Air

  1. People have the right to access accurate information and current, updated climate data about climate change, especially specific information about the impact of the climate crisis on where they live.
    1. Digital participants have the right to access such information without being tracked.
      Trackers are hidden on most websites and log incredible amounts of specific data about every user that interacts with the websiteWebsites employ dark patterns in order to trick users into granting permissions to access their data
    2. Digital participants have a right to access an open affordable connection to the digital world in order to access such information as well as participate in conservation and sustainability communications and efforts.

  2. Digital participants have the right to clear and accessible information about the algorithms behind the technology they are using.
    1. People have a right to know what is happening and how it is happening behind the scenes in terms of the algorithm, AI, and machine learning, for the technology that they are using.
    2. People have a right to feel confident that they have all of such information.
    3. Digital participants have a right to know who owns and controls the technology that they are using.

  3. Digital participants have a right to landscape their own digital ecology.
    1. At one point, facebook intentionally and secretly manipulated the moods of some users through what they were shown on their feed. Digital products and services track and sell your data as well as manipulate you into making certain decisions.
    2. Digital participants have the right to live a life detached from the digital world if they so wish. As innovations continue to permeate all aspects of daily life through the digital world, these innovations should not force or strongly coerce digital participants to spend vast quantities of their time in the digital world.

  4. Digital participants have a right to feel safe and protected in the digital space
    1. The digital space should be reliable, reputable, truthful, heterogeneous, and multilinguistic. As well as one that is protected, childsafe, and positive for kids.

  5. People have a right to equal access to housing and job opportunities without descrimination from algorithms

  6. People have a right to education and information about how to navigate the online ecology safely and how to landscape their own digital ecology.

  7. The more sustainable and environmentally-friendly a logistical system is, the more favorable it should be.

Fire

  1. Digital participants have a right to a digital environment in which digital actions are sustainable in regards to their input and output. By input, things like energy consumption are considered. By output, this can mean anything from a digital product like an interface, a physical object, or a service, either digital or physical, obtained from digital means.
    1. The electricity that drives the digital world is largely dependent on fossil fuels to sustain it which have many negative climate impacts which in turn have negative impacts on the world’s people.
    2. Wherever possible, companies should favor biodegradable materials. Plastics are a main component in digital objects. This massive usage of plastics in the omni-presece of digital objects in the modern world contributes to the microplastic crisis. Microplastics have been commonly found in the bloodstreams of people.
    3. Electronic waste is a large biohazard, creating a toxic environment for people and for the environment

  2. Digital participants have the right to have abundant access to organizations and companies that father their resources from ethical and human rights observing organizations. Extractive based organizations should be highly unfavorable and unsupported. Extractivism should not be the default mode of resource collection and accretion. Extractive capitalism has a hugely damaging effect on the environment and on human rights.

Water

  1. Digital participants should favor truly sustainable practices, models, and systems as they operate in the non-digital world whenever the participants operate in the digital world.
    1. Infrastructure requirements of these systems often have vast negative ramifications on the climate and environment. Making sure that these physical systems digital participants use are not actively detrimental but beneficial to the environment is a right digital participants should have and uphold.
    2. Fast fashion refers to the rapid turnover of fashion that leads to diminished levels of quality. This reduction in quality is very resource intensive as sustainability and longevity of the materials is ignored.
    3. Many companies often falsely use the terms of sustainability to make their products appear more favorable to the environmentally conscious buyer. Greenwashingis a term used to designate this practice.

  2. Digital objects that can be recycled and reused should be recycled and reused if a general comprehensive resource calculus determines it beneficial.
    1. A resource calculus will have continual evolving considerations of resources, energy, labor, and many more facets of how digital objects are produced, distributed, and used to determine how useful it is to recycle and reuse a digital object. An exact measure and definition of a resource will not be elaborated fully here but will hopefully be once more people alter this document. This is a government report on economic effects of recycling. A resource calculus might deem recycling an unfavorable option if, for example, a material, abundant through ethical means of acquiring, uses more energy to conduct the process of recycling than the materials and energy it saves. One would not recycle a yard of thin copper wire if it cost thousands of dollars and consume massive amounts of energy.

  3. Digital objects should also favor sustainable technologies, such as improved recyclability and reusability, as science develops and improves.
    1. Resource drainage affects the world in a number of ways. These often impede on human rights by exploitation and extraction from countries producing commodities or harvesting raw resources. A number of negative environmental impacts derive from this. As science finds new methods, new sustainable practices, companies should follow and incorporate these to their practices and individual/consumers should favor the companies that do so.
    2. Earth Overshoot Day determines how much of the earth we demand new materials and resources from in a calendar year and the rate of which over the years.

  4. People have the right to have access to companies, products, and resources, that not only rely on recycling and reuse as their only sustainability methods and praticies but also utilize other proactive and sustainable methods and practices.
    The overall importance of recycling in sustainability.

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