So I was sat in my garden the other day - I started off practising T'ai Chi but after admitting I'd forgotten the steps, I sat down and meditated for a while, looking at the garden. I noticed some litter in the grass. A can of coke, an old plastic wrapper and an empty tea candle. I stepped carefully into the grass and picked up the tea candle and that got me thinking (like I always do after T'ai Chi). What right do I have to remove this tea candle? What if the micro environment created by this tea candle had enabled some insect to survive and create a home there? Just because I see it as litter, does not objectively make it so and therefore I returned to my question, what right do I have to alter my environment in this way? In any way?
What are the indelible human rights? What does it mean to have a right to something at all? Do we have a right to the air that we breathe?
If we assume that we do have the right to the air that we breathe, what gives us this right? Is it our lungs? The fact that we can use the air to breathe gives us the right to use the air? Or is it an indelible right for any living creature to continue its own life?
This may seem unimportant, the ravings of a madman or both but the fact is we are stepping closer and closer to what the ancients would have considered the domain of the gods. We can create and destroy so much of the world at a whim - and not just corporations or kings or countries but the individual also has this power in a growing respect. These mundane or nonsensical ramblings about whether I had the right to move that empty tea candle extends beyond such trivialities and into the realm of the tangible, the significant and these questions of what right do we have are going to become more pervasive as the years go on and technology lifts us in its hands and carries us into the future.
