Abstract

Over the past several decades, environmental protection policies have been increasingly challenged by the growing political influence of the property rights movement. While environmental and property rights protection appear to be oppositional in their aims, the purpose of this research is to show that there exists a common core of ideas, collectively known as anthropocentrism, that thread through both efforts. Anthropocentrism is a human-centered view of the world that regards human needs and interests as separate from and superordinate to nature. That is, the worth of nature lies solely in its use-value to humans. To demonstrate the underlying philosophical commonalities of both movements, a critical review of the history of property rights and environmentalism is presented and two studies are conducted, each of which contains two cases. ;The first study analyzes the anthropocentric tendencies in two environmental statutes, the 1972 Coastal Zone Management Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act. The second study examines the anthropocentric aspects of the 1992 property rights case, Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council and a 104th Congressional hearing on property rights protection and regulatory takings. Within a comparative framework, the stated objectives, restrictions on property rights and exemptions from environmental protection compliance, and language of the four cases are analyzed through content analysis and categorized within an environmental perspectives continuum. ;This research further explores the philosophical, environmental, and social weaknesses of anthropocentrism. To counter the problems associated with the human centered environmental perspective, two popular alternatives, animal rights and deep ecology, are assessed and criticized. Animal rights theory is criticized as paralleling anthropocentrism's dualistic view of humans and nature and hierarchical subordination of the natural world. Deep ecology is criticized for its holistic superordination of the whole of nature over discrete individual entities. ;Ecofeminism is proffered as an alternative to traditional anthropocentrism, animal rights, and deep ecology. Ecofeminism predicates landownership and environmental protection on inherent value, respect for diversity, the recognition of intimate interconnections between humans and nature, and the ethic of care