Should the 4-day work week be mandatory?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should the 4-day work week be mandatory?". Your opponent's style: Tim Ferriss

this house believes that rights of environment should be made legally equivalent to rights of human.

Look, this sounds beautiful in theory, but it's a recipe for civilizational paralysis. You're essentially arguing that a mosquito's "right to life" should legally trump a child's right to malaria treatment, or that a forest's "right to remain unchanged" should block housing for homeless families. The fundamental flaw here is that rights require moral agents who can reciprocate - humans have rights because we can respect others' rights and make moral choices. A river doesn't choose to respect your property rights or vote on community decisions. We're not dealing with equivalent entities.What you're seeing in Ecuador proves my point perfectly. These rights immediately conflicted with the Ecuadorian government's plans to expand large-scale mining and oil extraction to finance development projects [1]. The result? The court stated that the rights of nature would prevail over other constitutional rights if they were in conflict with each other [1]. Think about what that means in practice - you've just created a legal framework where a forest's theoretical "rights" can override a community's actual need for economic development, jobs, or infrastructure. When push comes to shove between feeding families and protecting habitat, your system forces judges to pick ecosystems over people. The real kicker? Most lawyers and judges simply lacked knowledge of RoN and how to interpret it. The idea that individual and corporate property rights must be curtailed in some cases to uphold Nature's rights was not only foreign to most judges, but ran counter to their legal training [1]. You're asking legal systems to abandon centuries of jurisprudence based on human agency and reciprocal obligations for a philosophical concept that nobody can even define consistently. This isn't environmental protection - it's legal chaos disguised as progress.

this house does not believe' that rights of environment should be made legally equivalent to rights of human.

You're completely wrong about this. Look, I get the philosophical hesitation - it sounds abstract and unworkable until you see what's actually happening on the ground. Ecuador's been proving this works for over 15 years now. Here's what you're missing: these rights aren't about giving mosquitoes voting booths. They're about creating legal standing for ecosystems to challenge destructive activities in court. And it's working spectacularly. In 2021, Ecuador's Constitutional Court used rights of nature to stop international mining companies from destroying the Los Cedros cloud forest - mining operations stopped the month after the ruling [1]. The real kicker? This forest remains "a biodiversity hot spot and as a source of well-being for humans and nonhumans alike" [1]. Without these rights, it would be a strip mine right now. That's not legal chaos - that's environmental protection with teeth. You say judges lack knowledge? Wrong again. Over time, judges started to implement the laws around this intrinsic value, around this right to exist, and more and more often now they're starting to apply it [2]. The learning curve was real, but they figured it out. Now Ecuador's approach is spreading globally - Colombia granted rights to the Atrato River, New Zealand to Te Urewera, and the movement has generated 493 proposals across 44 jurisdictions [3]. The genius is this: corporations already have legal personhood and can sue for their interests. Why shouldn't ecosystems that actually sustain life have the same standing? Your "civilizational paralysis" is actually civilization finally getting its priorities straight.