{"id":42271,"date":"2025-04-22T22:55:08","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T22:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/42271\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T22:55:08","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T22:55:08","slug":"can-the-rights-of-nature-movement-save-the-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/42271\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the Rights of Nature Movement Save the Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWill the Great Lakes, one of the natural wonders of the United States, be allowed to go to court to defend their rights to exist on equal terms with the human race? Last month, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly granting them and all other bodies of water in New York those legal rights. The waters, the bill declares<\/a>, \u201cshall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist [\u2026] free from human violations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe bill comes at a time when the Trump administration has decimated<\/a> the National Park Service, directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back<\/a> environmental regulations, and tried to revoke billions<\/a> in climate change-combatting programs. Just days ago, President Trump issued an executive order allowing commercial fishing<\/a> in one of the world\u2019s largest ocean reserves. Now, more than ever, nature is in need of protection.<\/p>\n

\n\tGranting rights to certain natural bodies or ecosystems is an idea that\u2019s been a long time coming. Five decades ago, Christopher Stone, a professor at the University of Southern California law school, penned the idea. \u201cI am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called \u2018natural objects\u2019 in the environment,\u201d he wrote in the Southern California law review. \u201cIndeed, to the natural environment as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea of granting seemingly insentient organisms legal rights may sound preposterous, but the Rights of Nature movement is anything but fanciful; in fact, through local ordinances, court decisions, national legislation, and even constitutional amendments, the movement has made its way to 38 countries spanning six of the seven continents. In the U.S., the movement has touched 14 states, with varying degrees of success. Most notably, the Pennsylvania government, just five years ago, upheld<\/a> a 2014 local Rights of Nature law that had simultaneously outlawed the injection of fracking waste in small-town Grant Township.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIndigenous peoples across the world, particularly in the U.S., have become powerful leaders in the movement. In 2019, the Yurok tribe in northern California granted legal personhood to the Klamath River \u2014 the first river in North America to be granted such rights \u2014 and, in 2020, the Nez Perce Tribe General Council conferred rights upon the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1972, Professor Stone, son of the legendary muckraker I.F. Stone, published his thesis, in an article<\/a> entitled \u201cShould Trees Have Standing? \u2014 Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.\u201d Stone, who collected turtles in Rock Creek Park while growing up in Washington, D.C., was a 34-year-old law professor who had never before published anything about the environment. But he had passion.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBased on the beauty of his writing, which reads like a lawyer\u2019s love letter to the planet, he had a deep connection with and respect for the natural world,\u201d says Grant Wilson, an environmental lawyer and the executive director of Earth Law Center<\/a>, a group based in Colorado comprising nearly 30 lawyers and environmental experts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,\u201d Stone argued. \u201cCorporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems.\u201d Stone proposed using the same system of guardianship for natural objects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHis idea was cited in the 1972 Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton. The Sierra Club had sued the Secretary of the Interior to prevent the Walt Disney Company from building a ski resort on public land in Mineral King Valley, California. While the court ruled that the Sierra Club did not have standing to sue, as it had not alleged any concrete injury, Justice William O. Douglas issued a visionary dissent.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cContemporary public concern for protecting nature\u2019s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation,\u201d wrote Douglas. He asserted that \u201cthe critical question of \u2018standing\u2019 would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated\u2026in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers.\u201d Douglas contended that those who \u201chave a meaningful relation\u201d to a specific part of nature, who \u201cfrequent it or visit it merely to sit in solitude and wonderment,\u201d should be able to have standing and act as its legal representative.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe problem is to make certain that the inanimate objects, which are the very core of America\u2019s beauty, have spokesmen before they are destroyed,\u201d concluded Douglas.<\/p>\n

\n\tTHREE DECADES LATER, in 2006, it happened: Tamaqua Borough, a tiny town about 35 miles northwest of Allentown in Pennsylvania\u2019s coal country, became the first place in the world to codify the rights of nature in law. The law, entitled the \u201cSewage Sludge Ordinance,\u201d sought to ban waste corporations from dumping in Tamaqua any longer, stating that \u201cecosystems shall be considered \u2018persons\u2019 for the purposes of the enforcement of [their] civil rights.\u201d Although the law has never been tested in court, it has been credited with preventing further waste dumping.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2008, Ecuador became the first sovereign country to recognize the rights of nature in its national constitution, declaring that \u201cNature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycle, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.\u201d It also granted nature \u201cthe right to be restored\u201d and resolved the issue of standing in the most painless way possible: by granting it to everyone<\/a>. In Ecuador, any person can represent any piece of land in court \u2014 full stop.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2011, the owners of \u201cthe Garden of Paradise,\u201d a property on the banks of the Vilcabamba River, invoked Ecuador\u2019s constitutional provision to challenge a government highway project that was filling the river with excavated rocks and causing it to flood surrounding properties. With the river acting as plaintiff, a provincial court halted the project, effectively upholding the Rights of Nature provision. And in 2021, a series of decisions by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court further affirmed the rights of nature, blocking, among other actions, mining activities in the famously biodiverse Los Cedros forest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019ve seen the rights of rivers upheld in Bangladesh, along with a landmark decision from its Supreme Court calling upon governmental agencies to push back against illegal encroachment on the rivers,\u201d says Grant Wilson. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen the rights of Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in Spain, be recognized through national law and held up in their constitutional court, with legal guardians appointed to speak for and as the lagoon in a legal sense, just like a child might have a legal guardian. In other words, the lagoon has a voice in government.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Rights of Nature doctrine has surfaced in international codes and agreements. In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Resolution on Harmony With Nature, and has renewed it each year since. The resolutions seek to develop<\/a> a \u201cnew, non-anthropocentric paradigm in which the fundamental basis for right and wrong action concerning the environment is grounded not solely in human concerns.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a legally binding agreement signed in 1992, has declared a goal of global harmony with nature by 2050, endorsing the Rights of Nature as one possible pathway. Every nation in the world is party but four \u2014 Andorra, Iraq, Somalia, and the U.S., which has signed but not ratified the treaty.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2015, Pope Francis demanded<\/a> the UN prioritize the rights of nature \u2014 \u201cIt must be stated that a true \u2018right of the environment\u2019 does exist,\u201d he said \u2014 over society\u2019s \u201cselfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity.\u201d He asserted that \u201cany harm done to the environment, therefore is harm done to humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2010, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the first major U.S. city to adopt and make legally enforceable the rights of nature, recognizing them<\/a> as part of a ban on shale gas drilling and fracking. In 2017, the City Council of Lafayette, Colorado, population 30,000, passed the Climate Bill of Rights, an ordinance that \u2014 along with prohibiting the extraction of oil and gas \u2014 recognized ecosystems\u2019 rights to clean water and clean air, as well as to be free from chemical trespass, to exist, and to flourish. Just last December, a ballot initiative in the city of Everett, Washington, granted legally enforceable rights<\/a> \u2014 to exist, regenerate, and flourish \u2014 to the Snohomish River watershed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFOR ALL OF AMERICA\u2019S 248 years, its legal system has existed in service of human beings. In the eyes of the law, the environment matters only in human terms \u2014\u00a0how it serves as our property, how it generates revenue for our economy, how it produces the raw materials we rely on, how it provides recreation sites for our use, and how it affects our health. Even environmental legislation like the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act were only passed in order to make the environment safer for humans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf there is a forest cut down, to challenge that [in court] under the doctrine of standing, you have to show that a human was harmed by the forest being cut down,\u201d explains Wilson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut according to the principles of Rights of Nature, environmental damage alone, regardless of whether any humans are affected, is enough to hold up in court. \u201cThe key thing to know is that under a Rights of Nature framework, you\u2019re determining whether and how humans can respectfully take from nature, and you\u2019re really considering what\u2019s in the best interest of the larger community of life,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cCurrent laws are really rooted in human superiority to nature.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTo change this system means to fundamentally change how we relate to and conceive of nature. \u201cHumans don\u2019t simply live on a stage upon which only their own drama unfolds, as if trees and plants and animals and birds are just props in that human production,\u201d Dr. Wade Davis<\/a>, a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist who has studied Indigenous cultures extensively, tells Rolling Stone. \u201cOn the contrary, every living being, from the grandest blue whale down to a microscopic amoeba, is part of the living organism that is the Earth.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tChristopher Stone thought as much: \u201cI do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth\u2026as one organism,\u201d he wrote, \u201cof which Mankind is a functional part \u2014 the mind, perhaps: different from the rest of nature, but different as a man\u2019s brain is from his lungs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis line of thinking is deeply rooted in Indigenous customs. For the Maori, for example, in New Zealand, humans are lowest on the totem pole of the natural world, says Meghan Robinson, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia who is completing her doctoral research on the Rights of Nature. And to the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples in Colombia, says Davis, the water that runs down a river is no different from the blood that runs through one\u2019s veins.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut can the American legal system \u2014 and the society that governs it \u2014 change so radically that it sees nature as something more than simply a way to boost the GDP? As something sacred? Davis thinks yes. \u201cAll cultures are constantly changing. We preserve jam, not culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe very idea that a river could be considered to have rights would have been so inconceivably preposterous to my father\u2019s generation,\u201d he says. \u201cI mean, my father\u2019s generation was raised to believe that oil left in the ground was wealth wasted. That a tree left standing in the forest was money down the drain. The entire idea of an environmental or ecological ethos, things that we now take to be common, was completely off the charts and radical at that time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless \u2018things\u2019 to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo,\u201d wrote Stone in 1972. \u201cThe fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new \u2018entity,\u2019 the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNo matter how much we talk circles around it, American economic progress invariably comes with the exploitation of nature. Thus, the endowing of nature with rights will require some concessions on the part of humans, chiefly \u201ca willingness to suspend the rate of increase in the standard of living,\u201d as Stone put it. \u201cWe may have to \u2026 subordinate some human claims to those of the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJustice Douglas, in his 1972 dissenting opinion, warned against letting the \u201cbulldozers of \u2018progress\u2019 \u2026 plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOf course, it is necessary, for basic human survival, to take advantage of natural resources. But there are truly hard lines to draw when it comes to defining what taking is permissible and what constitutes an unacceptable violation of the rights of nature \u2014 especially when harming and healing the environment may go hand in hand. Michael Gerrard, a prominent environmental lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School, describes one such scenario to Rolling Stone: \u201cWe know that one of the most important things we need to do in order to fight climate change is to build a massive number of solar farms. Some of them will go in the desert. What if the desert had rights and could sue to prevent the solar farms from being built \u2014 which would be bad for the environment in general but might be good for the desert? The desert\u2019s lawyer would have the obligation to do everything they could to protect the desert.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut perhaps this dilemma is not as insurmountable as it seems. \u201cYou\u2019re inserting this new rights holder \u2014 nature \u2014 into the mix, and it\u2019s going to cause some tensions with other rights, as well as economic [and development] interests,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cYet in the legal system, there\u2019s tension between different rights all of the time \u2014 and the courts figure out how to balance those.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe live on a finite planet, but we\u2019re trying to say that we can have infinite growth \u2014 and that thought process is so unbelievably flawed,\u201d says Meghan Robinson. \u201cWe need to come up with a different economic system that doesn\u2019t think that we can grow infinitely in an unsustainable way. [If we don\u2019t,] the environment is just going to wipe us out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIN THE PAST DECADE or so, the Rights of Nature movement in the U.S. has become a battleground for fights over local sovereignty and corporatocracy. Numerous state legislatures, heavily lobbied by commercial industries, have preempted or challenged Rights of Nature laws, rendering them null, void, and wholly unenforceable. Four states \u2014 Florida, Ohio, Idaho, and Utah \u2014 have even gone as far as to summarily ban Rights of Nature legislation.<\/p>\n

\n\tTish O\u2019Dell is a lifelong Ohioan who grew up 10 miles from the shores of Lake Erie. \u201cI was always mesmerized by Lake Erie, even as a small child,\u201d she says. So when she learned of fracking taking place in her community, she went to her local elected officials. \u201c[Former Ohio senator] Sherrod Brown was in office, and me and another mom sat across from him with a folder of photos of toxic waste pits in our neighborhood and told him we didn\u2019t want our community poisoned,\u201d she says. \u201cHe just muttered back about all the jobs [fracking] was creating. It was then that [it hit me] that no one was coming to save my community or the environment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tO\u2019Dell proceeded to work with mothers from across Ohio (forming Mothers Against Drilling In Our Neighborhoods) to pass a 2012 Rights of Nature amendment in Broadview Heights, Ohio. When the local amendment was overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2015, she went on, with the help of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund<\/a> (CELDF), to propose more than 40 Rights of Nature laws throughout the state. Her crusade culminated in the Lake Erie Bill of Rights<\/a> (LEBOR), approved by Toledo, Ohio, voters in 2019, which recognized the lake\u2019s rights to \u201cexist, flourish and naturally evolve.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tYet U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, in a harshly written opinion, struck down LEBOR, overturning the first U.S. law ever to affirm the rights of a particular ecosystem on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague and oustripped the municipality\u2019s authority.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cLEBOR\u2019s authors failed to make hard choices regarding the appropriate balance between environmental protection and economic activity. Instead, they employed language that sounds powerful but has no practical meaning,\u201d wrote Zouhary. \u201cWhat conduct infringes the right of Lake Erie and its watershed to \u2018exist, flourish, and naturally evolve?\u2019 How would a prosecutor, judge, or jury decide? LEBOR offers no guidance.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2020, things seemed to look up for the movement when Grant Township\u2019s 2014 Rights of Nature law became the first such piece of legislation to be enforced by a state, with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) citing it in rescinding a fracking waste injection permit. Although the law has since been swept into a years-long saga of lawsuits \u2014 the ordinance was overturned and then enshrined into a Home Rule Charter, all while the DEP switched its stance back and forth \u2014 there is still no injection well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tSo what\u2019s next?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI think it\u2019s likely that one state is going to pass a Rights of Nature framework and it\u2019s going to propel the movement to a whole different level,\u201d predicts Wilson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce implemented, Rights of Nature legislation potentially affords a whole host of litigation advantages. For starters, it could completely wipe away the challenges of fulfilling standing requirements, which have traditionally been extremely vulnerable to the whims of judges \u2014 particularly conservative ones \u2014 seeking to constrict them. Moreover, litigating on behalf of a natural entity greatly diminishes the burden of proof, for one need not prove a human was harmed, only that the specific part of nature at hand was harmed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThe reality is that the widespread implementation of the Rights of Nature doctrine in the United States is not going to come quickly or easily. \u201cSomeone told me once that it takes about 200 miles to turn a big Boeing 747 around, and I think that\u2019s a fitting metaphor,\u201d says Wilson.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut progress is progress. \u201cAll these things are aggregate. Aggregate and cumulative,\u201d says Davis. \u201cThe movement itself is a statement that the mindset has already changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOver the past nearly 15 years, all over the world, governments, courts, indigenous nations, and people in their communities have secured the rights of nature in law,\u201d said<\/a> Mari Margil, who was previously the Associate Director of CELDF, at a 2020 environmental justice conference<\/a>. \u201cAfter all of these developments, the question is no longer \u2018Can nature have rights?\u2019 It can. And it does. The questions before us now are: How do we secure the rights of nature in every legal system around the world? And how do we do it while there\u2019s still nature left to save?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe environment is waiting for us to act, and the futures of both humanity and Mother Earth are on the line. So we must ask ourselves the question: Will anyone speak for nature? And if not us, then who?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Will the Great Lakes, one of the natural wonders of the United States, be allowed to go to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3843],"tags":[4174,728,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-42271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-climate-crisis","9":"tag-environment","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114384085022453304","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}