Should the environment have rights?

[2ndRateMind]

So, seems to me there are two ways to look on the global environment(s).

• The environment is instrumentally valuable, insofar as it provides the life support system for spaceship earth, not only for humans, but for all other species also. So we should protect it.
  
  The environment is intrinsically valuable, good in itself, an aesthetic masterwork, worthy of nurture and careful stewardship by humans for it's own sake.

So, do we give the environment rights? If we do, what rights, based on which of the two rationales above? For example, we have, in law, the concept of 'crimes against humanity', such as genocide. So, perhaps the idea of 'crimes against the global ecosystem', such as species extinction, is not so far-fetched. Just as humanity, an abstract concept, has protection in law, the global ecosystem, another abstract concept, maybe deserves similar protection.

Or, does it make no sense to allocate rights to a non-sentient system, however vital that system is to our thriving and flourishing and general well-being?

More fundamentally, is the 'common good' best served by allocating rights to the environment, or is there a better way to secure the sustainability of all species, including our own?

Best wishes, 2RM.