A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.

Environmental and human rights law emerged as autonomous and disconnected bodies of law with distinct normative underpinnings. Yet, these progressively evolved towards increasing normative interconnections and legal integration. This chapter historicises this evolution by retracing how concerns for environmental protection were legally framed in early environmental instruments and to what end. It then shows how these representations of environmental protection changed over time once they started being articulated in relation to human rights considerations. The analysis draws on early legislative instruments in environmental and human rights law and retrieves the competing rationales at stake in their negotiations, the diplomatic tensions that underpinned their adoptions, and the political and epistemic compromises that were struck to accommodate divergent views over environmental protection and socio-economic development embedded in broader post-colonial debates. The mainstream narrative of environmental protection as translated in modern environmental law is then problematised by demonstrating how specific concerns were accommodated while others were silenced, discarded or neglected. A dominant anthropocentric and synergistic frame emerged, which defines environmental protection as inherently beneficial to human rights. This led to a narrow focus on synergies between environmental and human rights protection, with scant attention paid to conflicts and trade-offs, as the chapter demonstrates.