nature rights person

belated/ 919

no merri

nb some use to ridicule corp person

see ecuador celdef

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Lawmakers in Utah are advancing legislation aimed at stopping a growing “rights of nature” movement that has coalesced around efforts in the state to save the Great Salt Lake.

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Utah Supports “Personhood” for Corporations, but Maybe Not Forests – Mother Jones

Utah Supports “Personhood” for Corporations, but Maybe Not Forests

New state bill targets a growing “rights of nature” movement.

KATIE SURMA}:

{This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the*Climate Desk *collaboration.}:

Lawmakers in Utah are advancing legislation aimed at stopping a growing “rights of nature” movement that has coalesced around efforts in the state to save the Great Salt Lake, which is drying up as a combination of climate change, development, and agriculture drain on its freshwater sources.

With activists promoting legislation recognizing that the Great Salt Lake has a right to exist, lawmakers in Utah’s House of Representatives on Tuesday voted in favor of a bill that would prohibit state and local governments from granting “legal personhood” to lakes and other bodies of water, animals and plants, among nature’s other constituents. The bill also prohibits governments in the state from granting legal personhood to artificial intelligence.

The so-called legal personhood bill, H.B. 249, cleared the house on Tuesday by a 58-11 vote. The bill must still pass the Utah Senate, where Republicans currently have a supermajority. If Gov. Spencer Cox, also a Republican, signs the bill into law, the new rules will take effect May 1, 2024.

The rights of nature movement has largely focused on garnering legal recognition that ecosystems and individual species possess certain inherent rights, including to exist and regenerate. Typically the laws also give specific guardians authority to enforce those rights, similar to the way legal guardians represent the interests of minors or people deemed incapacitated.

By using the structure of rights, the laws give nature, or components of it like forests and rivers, the ability to act in their own capacity under the law, similar to the way corporations, business partnerships, nonprofits and other non-human entities already do. That legal structure is often referred to as having legal personhood.

Rep. Walt Brooks (R-St. George), H.B. 249’s sponsor, told fellow lawmakers last week that the idea for a bill excluding nature from legal personhood came to him after he heard from constituents about the rights of nature movement

Rights of nature laws are on the books in multiple countries, and some Indigenous tribal nations in California, Idaho, and Oklahoma.

Brooks said that he believes only human beings should have “personhood” under the law. He would not say whether he believes legal personhood for corporations, business partnerships, and other nonhuman entities should be abolished, but said “this is the intent of the bill: to define personhood as a human being.” Utah law currently includes corporations, business partnerships and other nonhuman entities in its definition of “person.” Brooks also said he felt that existing environmental laws are more appropriate tools to protect ecosystems and emphasized that he is in favor of finding ways to strengthen environmental protection.

Beyond the Great Salt Lake’s demise, Utah has been beset by drought and Salt Lake City faces a persistent air pollution problem. Scientists predict that the loss of the Great Salt Lake, driven by human activities that divert water away from replenishing the lake as well as drought, could catalyze cascading ecological changes affecting the viability of multiple species, from birds to aquatic life. As the lake dries out, particulate matter, arsenic and other toxins in the lake bed are released into the atmosphere, affecting local communities.

H.B. 249 does not explicitly mention the Great Salt Lake, but the proposal comes amid growing efforts to obtain legal recognition that the lake possesses inherent rights to exist and to maintain water levels sufficient for ecosystem health. The “Save our Great Lakes” campaign’s proposed legislation also calls for the “appointment of an advisor or advisory body charged with the responsibility of speaking for the Lake and its watershed.”

Multiple tribal nations and countries have similar rights of nature laws on the books, including Spain, Ecuador, Panama, Bolivia, Uganda, The Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, the Yurok Tribe in California and the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho.

Among jurisdictions with rights of nature laws in place, the jurisprudence is most advanced in Ecuador, where the law was enshrined in the country’s 2008 constitution, largely due to pressure from Indigenous communities.

Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that the law requires mining companies to carry out detailed scientific studies in ecologically sensitive areas before being allowed to operate, and that wild animals possess distinct legal rights, including to exist, to develop their innate instincts and to be free from disproportionate cruelty, fear and distress. Still, extractive and development activity, most prominently oil production, have continued in Ecuador as courts work out how to balance the competing rights of businesses, humans and nature.

Opponents of rights of nature laws often argue that the higher level of protection those laws provide to ecosystems, as compared to conventional regulations, will impede necessary development. They also cite the need to quickly scale up electrification as a way to address climate change. Extracting from the Earth vast amounts of elements like lithium and copper for use in reusable batteries is likely to harm large swaths of nature.

“This continues to happen to tribes because of a perpetual lack of understanding that other people may not look at the world the way you do.”

Critics of Utah’s attempt to restrict nature from legal personhood say that the state legislation prevents local communities from making their own decisions about legitimate policies being advanced by governments elsewhere. They also say H.B. 249 contradicts and disrespects Indigenous belief systems without their input.

Those belief systems disagree with the mainstream cultural view that humans are separate from, and superior to, the natural world—a view manifested legally in the construct of human beings having rights to own, use and destroy nature, which is treated as property and has no rights.

The contrasting view of many tribes is that humans have complex, interdependent relationships with all parts of nature and have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world, which holds spiritual significance. Translating that worldview into western legal terms entails recognizing that nature, similar to humans, possesses distinct rights, advocates argue.

Utah is home to at least eight tribal nations, including part of the Navajo Nation. In 2002, the Navajo issued a resolution codifying the fundamental law of the Diné, the Navajo’s preferred name for its people, and recognizing that “All creation, from Mother Earth and Father Sky to the animals, those who live in water, those who fly and plant life have their own laws, and have rights and freedom to exist.” The Navajo Nation is a sovereign entity and Utah law does not apply on its tribal lands absent a congressional act.

George Hardeen, a spokesman with the Navajo Nation, declined to comment on H.B. 249 specifically, saying that he was reluctant to do so because he had not talked directly with the bill’s sponsors. Hardeen did say that it often never occurs to state lawmakers to take into consideration the point of view of the Navajo and other tribes in the state.

“They approach these things from a political perspective, not a spiritual perspective that is different from their own,” Hardeen said. “This continues to happen to tribes because of a perpetual lack of understanding that other people may not look at the world the way you do.”

Legal personhood, or extending legal rights to nonhuman entities, is not a new development. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property, and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.

In the United States, judicial recognition that corporations have legal rights dates to at least the 1886 U.S. Supreme Court Case Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific R. Co. More recently, the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission upheld first amendment rights for corporations with regard to spending on political advertisements.

Existing Utah law also defines a “person” as “an individual, corporation, partnership, organization, association, trust, governmental agency, or any other legal entity.”

“A right to exist, a right to be healthy, and a right to representation, such as through legal guardians, are three of the most important baseline rights that should be held by nature.”

Rights of nature advocates argue that extending legal personhood to nonhuman living beings and other aspects of nature is not dissimilar from the gradual extension of rights over time to different categories of humans. Historically, women, enslaved humans, Indigenous people and others were restricted from holding certain rights or were considered property. Only after political and cultural efforts did those categories of people win legal recognition as rights-bearing human beings.

More recently, attempts to extend legal personhood to non-human animals has gained traction in other countries while U.S. courts have stopped short of that in cases involving elephants and great apes. Advocates’ arguments in favor of legal personhood for those animals are based in part on developing science affirming that those species have high levels of intelligence and emotional capabilities.

Once legislatures or courts recognize the legal personhood of a nonhuman entity, the next question becomes what rights those entities have and who speaks for them, according to Jill E. Fisch, Professor of Business Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Corporations, for instance, have free speech rights but have been denied other rights afforded to humans. Existing rights of nature laws aim to assign rights that align with the essense of the natural feature: rivers have the right to flow, wild animals have the right to habitat, and lakes, like the Great Salt Lake, have the right to be replenished.

“If nature is a ‘person’ under the law, that does not mean it has all the same rights as humans,” said Grant Wilson, executive director of Earth Law Center, a U.S.-based nonprofit, “I think a right to exist, a right to be healthy, and a right to representation, such as through legal guardians, are three of the most important baseline rights that should be held by nature.”

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https://www.drilledpodcast.com/damages/

From the creators of Drilled, Damages is a new podcast that follows the hundreds of climate lawsuits currently unfolding all over the world. We think of it as Law & Order meets the climate crisis.

S1: The Forest for the Trees

In our launch season we delve into rights-of-nature laws in countries all over the world, including attempts by some local and tribal governments in the U.S. to apply the concept in American courtrooms. Rights of nature incorporates Indigenous approaches to nature into Western judicial systems by giving ecosystems the same rights that individuals have…which might sound really out there, but is it really so different from giving corporations human rights? Through the stories of cases brought on behalf of wild rice (Minnesota), a cloud forest (Ecuador), a mountainous region (New Zealand), and a lake (Ohio), we’ll look at the philosophical and legal roots of this idea, how it’s played out in the past, and how it could catalyze climate action.

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https://vimeo.com/ondemand/invisiblehand/

Art Pearl UCSC ed prof

radio show:https://artpearlagainsttheworld.blogspot.com/

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https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/drilled/a-brief-history-of-rights-of-9Dlm4sAUCRN/

Rights of nature first started making its way into U.S. courtrooms via an unlikely source: Disney. Today it's a huge threat to the fossil fuel industry. So much so that the industry is pushing preemptive bans on rights of nature laws in states across the country.

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https://www.climateone.org/audio/rewind-should-nature-have-rights

january 14th, 2022

In the last several years, a growing number of countries and places within the United States have tried to establish legal standing for natural ecosystems.

“The concept really posits that the way that we envision a person having particular rights and standing to sue in case somebody harms you, that that can be extended beyond human persons to aspects of what we would describe as the natural world and ecosystem: a river, a mountaintop, a national park, whatever the case may be,” says Rebecca Tsosie, a Regents professor of law at the University of Arizona.

In 2017, New Zealand granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person. India granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, and recognized that the Himalayan Glaciers have a right to exist. In the United States, those efforts have been more complicated, and frequently overturned by courts.

Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, a lawyer who has worked with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, says the rights of nature concept has moved from an “unthinkable” idea a few years ago to now exploring the details of “how would this actually work? What are the legal mechanisms by which this works?”

He says those mechanisms will determine whether the rights of nature becomes a paradigm shift or “simply recuperates a system that is ultimately destroying the earth on which we depend.”

For example, a legal person usually has the right to sue and be sued.

“Should ecosystems have that same set of personhood rights, or should it be different? I think that we should be very careful about the idea of ecosystems being able to be sued or being able to have liability,”Schromen-Wawrin says.

Decades ago, Carol Van Strum’s legal battle opposing the use of herbicides in her local national forest eventually led to a ban on aerial herbicide spraying on national forests across the country.

More recently, she and others in Lincoln County, Oregon, organized a measure banning the use of aerial spraying of pesticides on corporate timberlands, using the rights of nature argument. Voters passed the measure in 2017 but the timber companies immediately challenged it in court. The judge ruled that state law preempted the local ordinance.

Van Strum’s group appealed the decision, but in 2021, the Oregon Supreme Court opted not to hear the Lincoln County case, upholding the trial court decision allowing for the continued use of aerial pesticides and denying the ability of the Siletz River watershed to be seen as a rightful party.

Related Links:

A Bitter Fog

Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

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https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/7/headlines/ecuador_high_court_sides_with_indigenous_groups_in_dispute_over_drilling_and_mining

Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has ruled that Indigenous communities should have much more control over whether to allow extractive projects on their lands. In a decision handed down Friday, judges ruled that Indigenous groups can halt proposed mining and oil drilling projects if they’re found to require “excessive sacrifices to the collective rights of communities and nature.”It’s a blow to President Guillermo Lasso, who has promised to double Ecuador’s oil production, and a major victory for the A’i Cofán communityand other Indigenous groups who’ve suffered the effects of environmental destruction for decades.

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https://drillednews.com/category/international/

DONZIGER SENTENCED TO SIX MONTHS FOR CONTEMPT RELATED TO CHEVRON-ECUADOR CASE

Human rights attorney Steven Donziger sentenced to 6 months in prison on criminal contempt charge stemming from Chevron-Ecuador case.

Karen Savage / October 3, 2021

DONZIGER FOUND GUILTY ON CONTEMPT CHARGES RELATED TO CHEVRON-ECUADOR CASE

Karen Savage / July 26, 2021

WE’VE HAD CORPORATE PERSONHOOD FOR A DECADE…WHAT ABOUT ECOSYSTEM PERSONHOOD?

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Oil and gas companies are getting nervous about an increased push worldwide for laws governing the rights of nature.

Amy Westervelt / April 10, 2021

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https://celdf.org/

https://publicherald.org/invisible-hand/

https://publicherald.org/

https://drillednews.com/weve-had-corporate-personhood-for-a-decade-what-about-ecosystem-personhood/

no lnx vid trailer

We’ve Had Corporate Personhood For A Decade…What About Ecosystem Personhood?

Oil and gas companies are getting nervous about an increased push worldwide for laws governing the rights of nature.

by Amy Westervelt | Apr 10, 2021

In our last narrative season, La Lucha En La Jungla, about the decades-long fight over oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I mentioned something unique about Ecuador’s constitution. It includes a provision for the rights of nature.Ecuador rewrote its constitution in 2008 to include a chapter called Rights for Nature. Other countries have toyed with this idea since then, and it freaks a lot of people out, especially people running large multinational corporations, mainly because it challenges one of the core tenets of capitalism: private property.Rather than treating nature as property under the law, rights for nature articles acknowledge that nature in all of its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate, and that we, the people, have the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of ecosystems. Here’s Natalie Green with the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature, explaining how the concept works in Ecuador.

“Well, Ecuador in 2008 rewrote its constitution and it was passed by the majority of Ecuadorians. And what we decided is that we don’t want to follow a model for development like a socialist model or capitalism model, because all those models were proven to be wrong. And we decided to recognize something that is that we are going to fight for and we’re going to be working for a model based on well-being. What’s what’s established in the Constitution is a model based on well-being and what is well-being, or bien vida in Spanish? It will be this notion of living in harmony with nature.”

And here is a handy explainer from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which has been leading a lot of the fights for rights of nature in the US.

“Under the current system of law, nature is considered to be property when something is considered property that often gives the property owner the right to damage it. Therefore, those who own these natural communities are largely allowed to use them however they wish, even if that includes destroying it. Rights of nature is honoring and recognizing that nature has the right to exist, flourish and thrive. Laws recognizing the rights of nature change the status of these ecosystems to being recognized as rights bearing entities.”

In late 2020, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court heard a rights of nature case for the first time. It’s called the Los Cedros case. And here’s what it’s about, in broad strokes: With the country’s oil revenue decline in 2017, the Ecuadorian government opened up public lands for mining concessions—six million acres, including at least 68 percent of Los Cedros, a protected cloud forest. The idea was that those mining profits would make up for lost oil revenue…the long shadow of oil colonialism. But because there was that rights of nature provision in the Constitution, citizen groups were able to sue the government for this move. They called it unconstitutional. And a couple of the justices on that court wrote about it ahead of time, saying how important the forest was to protect and how eager they were to think through the application of rights of nature. Their decision hasn’t come down yet, but when it does, it’s going to have a major impact all over the world.

Meanwhile, communities in the U.S. have started to embrace this idea, too. And no surprise, their biggest opponents are oil and gas companies. There’s a concerted effort underfoot, supported by the American Petroleum Institute to pass laws that would preempt rates of nature laws from ever being passed.

I’m joined today by Joshua BoazPribanic and Melissa Troutman. They’re the co-founders of the great independent journalism outlet Public Herald. They’ve done a lot of the work on fracking and the impacts of that industry on Pennsylvania and Ohio and on water in general. They made a documentary about rights of nature called Invisible Hand. It takes a look at the push for rights of nature laws in the U.S., particularly in two spots in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The film came out in 2020. Here’s a preview of it:

Melissa and Josh talked about how they came to follow the rights of nature, how they’ve seen it play out on the ground in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and why the idea has an unlikely opponent, big environmental groups.

Listen to the episode:

TRANSCRIPT:

Melissa Troutman: I get Google Alerts for rights of nature in my inbox every day, and it’s there’s constantly new news about rights of nature all over the globe, particularly in the United States. What’s happening right now is there’s a growing movement to establish rights of nature in Florida to protect the fragile ecosystems down there, particularly from the effects of climate change.

Amy Westervelt: Interesting

MT: And there’s also some news just that I just read today that there’s a convention on biological diversity and that’s an international environmental treaty. And they just convened in Colorado a couple of days ago and signed the first international environmental treaty to advance the rights of nature. This is a milestone for the global environmental movement and that that will be voted on at their next meeting in China. So. There’s a lot more happening worldwide, the the big case, the the big spotlight that everybody in the movements are watching right now is Ecuador. Because in Ecuador, Ecuador was the first country to establish rights of nature and its national constitution back in 2008. And for about 10 years after that, there were a couple of cases that went before the constitutional court in Ecuador. And but the those the the judges at the time didn’t seem to prioritize rights of nature. So it didn’t really nothing much happened there. But as of twenty nineteen, there is a new panel of judges on the constitutional court in Ecuador. And this this particular court has prioritized rights of nature specifically, and they have selected a few cases to concentrate on so that the parameters of rights of nature, how it is applied in practical ways, the scope of the law is worked out, and one of those cases before the Constitutional Constitutional Court of Ecuador is a case to protect Los Cedros Forest Reserve from mining. It’s a very, very ecologically diverse forest that will be gone if concessions for mining put forth by the Ecuadorian government go through.

Joshua Pribanic: Well, I think we should speak to some of the updates in the film too. You have the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which is one of the stories that’s covered in the film that’s an International Waters case. So you do have these conflicting territorial resolutions about, you know, how much water is going to be taken out of the lake, for instance. I mean, you’re dealing with, you know, basically treaty type situations where you’re trying to come to an agreement between the two international borders. But those confrontations and that kind of court case and negotiation seems to be something that’s going to happen here in the future. There’s certainly a lot of discussion about, you know, toxic trespass, the idea of Canada or somebody else introducing pollution from one country into another and holding them accountable. But I think that in the cases with Lake Erie, rather than the regulatory agency being the people who take over that decision-making process about what’s going on with the lake and its health, the local community is able to gain the kind of power and authority that they need, through the rights of nature, ifToledo’s able to make that sacrosanct in the city. So that way they’re dealing with Canada or somebody else across the table when it comes to negotiations about Lake Erie. And they’re doing it on behalf of Lake Erie. Not on behalf of these regulators who, you know, have basically polluted that lake to the point where it’s unswimmable, undrinkable, is killing a massive number of of species just due to the way permits have been handed out on that west side of the Lake Erie Basin. And just recently, the city is negotiating whether or not to pay out $200,000 in attorney costs. And basically for this this, you know, bill that they passed that they had to argue in front of the court. And the, you know, the prosecution’s asking for payment of two hundred thousand dollars. So they’re negotiating whether or not to pay that. So if you want to take action, you can either help, you know, Toledoans for Safe Water raise funds to contribute to that fight over there. Or you can contact Toledo directly and tell them not to participate in this, you know, egregious request to make the city pay this $200,000 for a democratically elected bill.

AW: I’m curious about what your hopes are for this documentary in terms of raising awareness or where it might help to take the story.

MT: Well, Joshua and I, since cofounding Public Herald in 2011, we’ve come into this work through water, our initial projects were investigations of water contamination, the cover up of water contamination related to fracking, development in protected watersheds in Pennsylvania. And it was it’s over the past 10 years that we’ve discovered I mean, it didn’t take 10 years, but that we’ve discovered that the system of law that is in place, of environmental law, that is supposed to protect things like our water, which is essential for life, of course…they fail. And an examination of why they fail brought us to create this documentary, Invisible Hand. And with this film, I see it as just the beginning of continued coverage of how people confront the systemic fundamental flaws in our legal system and in our society, which is built on these same legal foundations, but also our value system as we struggle with climate change, with racism, with ecocide. I mean, all of these problems stem from the same fundamental flaw for me, which is a disconnection from the laws of nature which govern the universe and keep everything in balance. I think that the film is just the beginning of covering this debate, and really it’s the film is about the the movement that itself is in its infancy and in terms of the way that movements go. So my hope is that this film introduces the concept to a level of detail to people who may have never heard of it or who just heard in passing and shows how communities actually implement this and how brave and resilient they are in this fight, because it’s a really, really hard one. I mean, you’re talking about shifting a paradigm which is not just our legal system, but also also our civilization and the way we live. That is a huge, huge deal. But as big and complicated as that struggle is, it’s also very, very simple. Because the laws of nature are simple.

AW: I’m glad that you used all the clips of the people saying this is some silly this is ridiculous. In contrast with, like, the woman explaining what it actually does because people do they talk about it as like, oh, what do you want a tree to be a negotiating these treaties, you know, and say, no, no, we’re talking about community control over the resources that the community depends on, which they don’t have otherwise.

JP: Truly, truly, they don’t have. And Grant is a perfect example of that. And so is Toledo and then some of the other people that we. Yeah. Included in the film. And yeah, you’re right. I mean, it was really nice to hear from these these antagonists and what they have to say about it, because, you know, when you listen to those arguments about basically why life shouldn’t have rights, they sound pretty obscene. And they get to kind of the core of the problems with capitalism and with, you know, libertarianism or other things like that, which have created this enormously selfish situation that relies on a completely utopian fantasy that we will have unlimited resources provided by the earth forever.

AW: I wonder if there are thoughts that you have on the media side of this coin and sort of how these stories do or don’t get amplified in the broader media sphere… I’m sure you have many!

JP: It was so bad. We were… alright Melissa and I have nothing but the best intentions when it comes to sharing a story. You know, Public Herald is not some kind of profit machine where we’re just focused on our bottom line. Our goal is to, you know, to tell the story the way it is, rather than allow these propaganda machines to keep operating and basically either diffuse stories or just lie and tell false stories. I remember we were talking about this and we had a documentary that we thought of called The JournoNation, which was the mix between journalism and public relations, because so much of the journalism that we expected to work with across the state had been infiltrated by this public relations fallacy of balanced journalism, that they were just…they were shooting themselves in the foot. Every time they tried to publish a story, you know, we would send them a story like, say, for instance, we sent a newspaper, a story that was that first complaint story that we did in 2014, which was on The Daily Show. And it’s this like really grainy, you know, look at how a complaint happens from day one to like day forty five when the investigation is concluded. And you’re reading this story and it’s happening in real time, you know, as you’re reading it, you know, you’re on day 31, you’re reading it like as it’s happening. So we’re including all the sources and everything. And we give this to another newspaper to publish a print version of it locally. And they weren’t able to do it because they weren’t able to balance the story by calling the state and the industry PR groups to provide a positive spin on all of this negative shit that was happening.

MT: On people being without water for months. Because there’s something positive in there…

JP: I’m like, you guys are editorializing these stories. You understand that, right? You think you’re creating a balance, but you’re not actually including what’s happening with just the primary sources and just the people involved. You’re trying to to paint this reality with these outsiders and bringing their voices in to shroud the seriousness of what these people are facing and and the fact that the state doesn’t want to comment like that’s what the state doesn’t want to do. So that’s what you publish. You don’t know that? You can’t publish the story until you get a comment? You’ve got all the state’s emails and everything else. So this happened everywhere. This happened with our relationships with NPR. You know, we tried to do some stories with NPR and and that just went totally south. And they got stuff way wrong. We published this giant report about state misconduct with layers of evidence just thrown throughout the whole thing about specific cases where the …

MT: Well not so much thrown as strategically placed…

JP: Ha, right. You know, looking at water contamination. And so we’re like, hey, you guys, we we just worked on this for three years. We really want you to cover this story about the state misconduct, and the attorney general’s investigating it. Like we’ve talked to the attorney general, they’re out in the field. They’re talking to people. They’re like, well, we can’t write a story until the attorney general tells us that they’re investigating it. And I’m like, it’s the attorney general…?

AW: Right. They don’t do that. You know the AG is investigating something when they file a suit.

JP: Right! Like…they’re investigating you dipshits. Go out there and publish it. So that’s been like the constant wall of trying to to take these stories that are so important and that are people are suffering with and get them into the mainstream media. And the mainstream media just has this amazing wall that they don’t let anything through, which it’s not such a big deal for us because we have a huge readership. Right. So it’s not like, you know, we haven’t fallen short on that side of it. We we utilize things like Google ads. We utilize things like social media, you know, and all these different advertising platforms and public.

MT: And the films. The films themselves have really built our audience. But the issue with not getting into mainstream is that we’re not getting to their audience. And these these are people who need to be informed about what’s actually going on. You know, if we have an election coming up and people are voting and. Yeah, and if you don’t know the truth about everything, if you have this picture in your mind of what’s happening with fracking, for instance, in Pennsylvania, which is the second largest producer of natural gas in the country, if you know, if you have this picture of things as if they’re balanced, which is what the mainstream media tends to report, including people like NPR, then. People think things are OK, and that is very, very much not the case.

AW: Yeah, we actually covered this in a Drilled season, like, exactly how the whole false equivalence thing was created mostly by oil and gas companies, and how the woman who is in charge of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting right now was one of the key architects of that and of climate denial and in fact, came up with the fucking term clean coal. So yeah, I’m not surprised that NPR does a bad job…

MT: Wow.

AW: Yeah. I’m curious what you’re actually seeing on the ground with people in Pennsylvania and how fracking regulation plays there.

JP: I have my own version of that, Melissa do you wanna go first?

MT: No, no you start and then I’ll talk about my experience living on the front lines.

JP: Okay, so I went to college and studied comprehensive planning and zoning. And I saw a lot of that work happening in Pennsylvania with regards to controlling fracking and keeping it in specific zones. And, you know, working withFood and Water Watch to create a zoning plan that will protect your community from oil and gas and these kinds of things. And here you have a Grant [Grant Township] and Grant is doing the exact opposite. Grant is saying for you to tell me that I have to zone things in my area and then make sure that there is a place for waste in our community to make sure there’s a zone for waste in our community, that…that’s fucking unconstitutional. And we’re not going to do that. We’re going to pass home rule. And this home rule will have a bill of rights which says what our laws are and what you must follow when you’re in our community. It will not be these unconstitutional mandates that we have to accept waste or we have to accept fracking in our community. And that’s something that Pennsylvania allows.

Now, the problem is with banning fracking in Pennsylvania and why you don’t see Grant and 100 other communities like you did in a place like New York is the entire green movement in Pennsylvania, every single organization I’ve ever talked to about this, no one is focusing on passing home rule bans inside of communities except for CELDF [Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund]. CELDF is the only one I know who’s, like, created a platform for communities to actually ban fracking or ban infrastructure or ban landfills or ban anything, you know, through something like home rule, because they’ve said this is the most powerful part of the law and this is where we’re going to help you pass if you want to pass.

And they’re not going to push any of that on you. They’re just suggesting, you know what it is that they see. However, the the environmental organizations have completely lost track of how to deal with this with this problem. And they are entirely invested in zoning and ordinance plan plans, entirely invested. So they’re taking communities who are in dire straits, who want to ban fracking so it doesn’t happen next to a school or they want to ban fracking and they don’t want these wells or they don’t want injection wells like Plum Township. And they’re taking these communities. They’re saying, well, we’ll help you build these really strong zoning and ordinance laws and that’ll make everything OK. And I don’t have an example of where that’s OK. All I ever see with Melissa and I filming this stuff, and we have been to I cannot tell you how many of these boring ass zoning meetings where it’s a hearing and we’re there for four hours. The whole damn thing, watching every attorney talk. I mean, so many times did we do this for this film to try and find one positive piece to stick in there about zoning and ordinance? We couldn’t get a shred of it. It was just a total, total failure. So on the banning side and that whole situation, there is not good communication in Pennsylvania about your opportunities to ban fracking locally with home rule. And that’s something that as reporters, I feel really important to share with communities because other newspapers have said, you know, Grant Township will not win. Grant Township as a case of home rule, they won’t win and this isn’t going to work. And then they win. And I’m like, are you going to go back and retract your statement in your paper? Like, do we need to send you corrections for this? Because you just misled a lot of readers about what they’re supposed to do with fracking and basically told them that what Grant’s doing, which is the exact same thing that Pittsburgh did, which has a ban on fracking, isn’t going to hold up in court when in fact, it has. So, yeah, it’s a really confusing situation on that front now.

You know, Ohio’s different. Ohio lost that control. Their state Supreme Court stripped them of local control. So they need to go at the state level and kind of work their way down. But, yeah, it’s a really dynamic story. And I wish somebody would write about it, but we just don’t have the capacity right now.

MT: Yeah. I mean, the environmental groups in Pennsylvania have…there’s no campaign to ban fracking, and yet even though as as you’re seeing in the polls, Amy, the majority of people in Pennsylvania support a moratorium at the least. And so it’s it’s a bit of a mystery to me why that is. I don’t know if it’s because a lot of the environmental organizations are based in cities and there’s no fracking in cities. So I work remotely and I live my family on the front lines of fracking. We live on a road that has essentially become the driveway for a fracking wastewater facility. So there’s radioactive for those radioactive fracking waste being given over top of our water supply facility. Radioactive fracking waste is being trucked over our water supply every day.

AW: Wow.

MT: And right, the environmental community does not get behind the rights of nature community rights movement. In fact, when I’ve brought it up with environmental groups, their response is that, well, if we allow communities to decide what’s right for them, then some of them will choose what’s wrong. They’ll choose to enact laws to promote bad things like more fracking. And I try to explain that’s not exactly how it works. I mean, community rights work as an addition of increased protection. It doesn’t steal… you can’t pass a local law that’s going to poison the next community over. That’s not the purpose or the meaning of it all is. So I think that fear is very unfounded.

AW: But that’s interesting. Do you think that also with the larger national environmental orgs that it’s some kind of playing politics thing, too, that they’ve bought into this this story, that a fracking ban is untenable to voters?

JP: 100%. Food and Water Watch is a fracking ban organization. But in Pennsylvania, that push does not exist. It is a zoning and ordinance organization. And I’ve confronted them on this because we showed Invisible Hand earlier at one point. And the community wanted to use home rule. They wanted to ban fracking and Food and Water Watch wouldn’t come to the show. They wouldn’t show up at the show, even though they have field agents in that community, because it wasn’t a zoning and ordinance situation. It was a home rule, ban fracking situation. And that kind of you know, I felt an obligation there, as a journalist, to make that clear. So I did publish my own editorial in regards to the mayor of Pittsburgh’s statements about home rule and why they felt that home rule was the only thing that would stop fracking in Pittsburgh rather than zoning ordinance laws, which it has up to this point. Against what I was being told by the food and water rights organization in Pennsylvania, which was that, you know, the better route to take was to try and push fracking to the edges of the community through zoning, which if you’ve ever been involved in a case with a corporation under zoning laws, they will find a way, one way or another, to change the zone so they can put their well pad there. If they don’t do it this year, they’ll do it four years down the road, which is exactly what they did in this community who wanted to have home rule and ban oil and gas infrastructure because a natural gas power plant from Invenergy was proposed to be built there. And it is, you know, right now getting its air quality permits outside of Pittsburgh in Elizabeth Township. And it will increase dramatically all these different particulates and air pollution that’s happening in the Pittsburgh region. And that could have all been stopped had green organizations created some kind of mobility and support for a community who had, you know, a dozen or more people organized to go out, collect signatures, get home rule passed and ban the power plant. But instead, you know, they were left on their own. They were ostracized by bigger green organizations for taking this position. I mean, it’s astonishing treatment of the good intentions of a community trying to protect themselves.

AW: That’s really interesting.

MT: I mean, all of these environmental organizations are funded by philanthropic foundations. And, yes, many of these foundations, their priority is to make the system that’s in place work better. The fundamental piece that’s missing is that the system is working precisely as it’s supposed to. And we can dicker and play whack a mole to rearrange words on pieces of paper that are always meant to treat nature as property and always meant to prioritize commerce over basic life. And the problem that remains the same, you know, is that our laws are designed to serve an economic paradigm that treats nature as property and as a commodity. And that paradigm…our environmental laws come from that system, and that’s why they have failed and they are going to continue to fail until we see nature as something else, until we see nature as what it really is. The rights of nature movement that we’ve come to cover after covering all of this environmental degradation and this infighting about how to protect ourselves and, you know, do we pass home rule laws or do we zone it to the outskirts of our community…which is incredibly unjust, by the way. Our way of life and our system of law are constantly extracting from the outskirts of the marginalized people and places. And the environmental groups are wrapped into that system, they’re part of the capitalist system, the colonial system that has created this problem and will continue to until we manage to fundamentally shift the structure of law and our value system.

You mentioned the technologists that think that we can we can techno fix our way out of this problem…

AW: Yeah

MT: But that is absolutely absurd because technology…you don’t just wave a wand and create a piece of technology out of thin air. It has to be extracted from somewhere. And it’s usually composed of pieces and parts and materials that are extracted from those marginalized communities that have sacrificed for hundreds of years now to the industrial revolution. And so to techno fix our way out is just to perpetuate more of the same harm. But what we need to do, and I’m not saying that technology isn’t part of our solutions moving forward, but we have to put at the center of our decision-making processes, nature and the laws of nature. We have to start there. We have to design our future systems and redesign our way of life and redesign our legal system with the laws of nature at the center, we have to before we switch to one hundred percent renewable energy. We need to ask ourselves how to do that in alignment with the laws of nature and that’s that’s just how we have to do it moving forward. It’s not about you can never cut down a tree or you can never drive a car. It’s about how we do that as communities. As interconnected communities of people and living other non-human relatives. You know, maybe it’s not that we can’t drive a car, it’s that we have to share cars. It’s not that we can’t cut down a tree. It’s that we have to acknowledge that we share forests and forone corporation to take a forest like Los Cedros, or a mining company to in Ecuador, for them to get a concession to decimate an entire forest. That kind of activity, that kind of economic paradigm, that kind of social value system needs to absolutely end. It’s suicide if we don’t. And instead, the decisions that we make moving forward about whether it’s to mine lithium for electric car batteries or cut down trees for housing material, those decisions need to be made as communities, not as, you know, corporate entities that can sit at the top of the priority list for our legal system.

https://www.utoledo.edu/law/academics/ligl/pdf/2020/Kilbert-LEBOR.pdf

I. INTRODUCTION The innovative Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), an amendment to the City of Toledo, Ohio charter which declared that Lake Erie has enforceable rights,1 debuted to much fanfare in 2019. City residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of the new ordinance in a special election. 2 Many hoped it would be a new legal tool in the fight against harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie, which have plagued the region for decades and in 2014 deprived nearly half a million persons in the Toledo area of safe public drinking water for three days. The ordinance also was widely hailed as a groundbreaking “rights of nature” law, and one of its leading proponents was invited to and addressed the United Nations.3

Yet just a year later LEBOR was dead, declared to be unlawful.4 This article examines LEBOR and what gave rise to it,5 and describes and evaluates how all three branches of government—judicial, executive and legislative—played roles in killing LEBOR.6 But it also argues that LEBOR, a well-intentioned albeit legally flawed ordinance, remains significant even after its demise.7

...V. LEBOR IS STILL SIGNIFICANT LEBOR is dead, but its importance lives on.

LEBOR is a high-profile landmark in the nascent “rights of nature” law movement in the United States. As such, it may inspire more jurisdictions to pass laws providing that a natural resource has enforceable rights. Admittedly, at this stage it is not clear what legal advantages a “rights of nature” law confers for fighting pollution or protecting a natural resource. Arguably, however, recognizing that a lake or other natural resource has enforceable rights could have procedural, substantive and rhetorical advantages.71

Procedurally, it could make standing less of a hurdle.Instead of having to show an individual plaintiff has suffered an injury from pollution to the lake [cancer notoriously hard to pin down?] , perhaps injury in fact could be established simply by showing the plaintiff lake itself has been injured by pollution.72 Substantively, whereas environmental regulatory laws like the Clean Water Act literally permit discharges of pollution to the lake, affording the lake “rights” might place more emphasis on protecting the lake from pollution.

If a fictional entity like a corporation can benefit from having rights like a person, why not a real entity like a lake?73

Rhetorically, advocates may find it more powerful to be viewed as arguing on behalf of the lake itself, not just a person or group.74 Even more significant, though, is the signal that LEBOR has sent. LEBOR shows that the people of Toledo—to borrow a famous line from a classic movie—are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.75

It has been six years since the Toledo tap water crisis of August 2014, and unfortunately not much has changed: the legislative and executive branches of Ohio have done little to regulate agricultural stormwater runoff and HABs continue to plague Lake Erie every summer or fall. LEBOR is stark proof that the people of Toledo are tired of waiting for their state government to act, so they are trying to take control of their own destiny. More than 10,000 persons signed the petition to get LEBOR on the ballot, and then an overwhelming majority of votes were cast in favor of adding it to the city charter.76

The message to Ohio’s elected officials, and the agency personnel they appoint, should be unmistakable: Take action to reduce phosphorus loading to Lake Erie by regulating agricultural stormwater runoff, or else the people of Toledo—and the many other voters in Ohio who care about Lake Erie—will take action themselves in the next election by voting against those who failed to do what is necessary to solve the HABs problem in Lake Erie.

VI. CONCLUSION

LEBOR is a pioneering “rights of nature” ordinance that grew out of frustration with existing state and federal laws that have failed to solve the severe HABs problem in Lake Erie. Given life by citizens at the ballot box, LEBOR was quickly snuffed out by the judicial branch, the executive branch and, perhaps most egregiously, the legislative branch. Although LEBOR is now dead in the water (pun intended), government officials should heed its loud, clear message and take the overdue steps necessary to restore a clean, healthy Lake Erie.

73Cf. Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n, 558 U.S. 310 (2010) (corporations are protected by First Amendment right to free speech)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature

Rights of Nature is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges twentieth-century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as "resource", to be owned, used, and degraded. Proponents argue that laws grounded in rights of nature direct humanity to act appropriately and in a way consistent with modern, system-based science, which demonstrates that humans and the natural world are fundamentally interconnected.

This school of thought is underpinned by two basic lines of reasoning. First, since the recognition of human rights is based in part on the philosophical belief that those rights emanate from humanity's own existence, logically, so too do inherent rights of the natural world arise from the natural world's own existence. A second and more pragmatic argument asserts that the survival of humans depends on healthy ecosystems, and so protection of nature's rights in turn, advances human rights and well-being.

From a rights of nature perspective, most environmental laws of the twentieth century are based on an outmoded framework that considers nature to be composed of separate and independent parts, rather than components of a larger whole. A more significant criticism is that those laws tend to be subordinate to economic interests, and aim at reacting to and just partially mitigating economics-driven degradation, rather than placing nature's right to thrive as the primary goal of those laws. This critique of existing environmental laws is an important component of tactics such as climate change litigation that seeks to force societal action to mitigate climate change.

As of 2021, rights of nature laws exist at the local to national levels in 17 countries, including dozens of cities and counties throughout the United States. They take the form of constitutional provisions, treaty agreements, statutes, local ordinances, and court decisions.

Basic tenets

Proponents of rights of nature argue that, just as human rights have been recognized increasingly in law, so should nature's rights be recognized and incorporated into human ethics and laws.^[1] This claim is underpinned by two lines of reasoning: that the same ethics that justify human rights, also justify nature's rights, and, that humans' own survival depend on healthy ecosystems.^[2][3][4]

Thomas Berry - a U.S. cultural historian who introduced the legal concept of Earth Jurisprudence who proposed that society's laws should derive from the laws of nature, explaining that "the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects"^[5][6][7]

First, it is argued that if inherent human rights arise from human existence, so too logically do inherent rights of the natural world arise from the natural world's own existence.^[8] Human rights, and associated duties to protect those rights, have expanded over time.^[3][9] Most notably, the 1948 adoption by the United Nations, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) that formalized recognition of broad categories of inalienable human rights. Drafters of the UDHR stated their belief that the concept of fundamental human rights arose not from "the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing."^[10]

Some scholars have contended thereafter that, given that basic human rights emanate from humans' own existence, nature's rights similarly arise from the similar existence of nature, and so humans' legal systems should continue to expand to recognize the rights of nature.^[1][2][11]

Some notable proponents of this approach include U.S. cultural historian Thomas Berry,^[6][7] South African attorney Cormac Cullinan, Indian physicist and eco-social advocate Vandana Shiva, and Canadian law professor and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and the Environment David Boyd.^[12][13][14]

Vandana Shiva - an Indian scholar and activist who has written extensively on Earth Jurisprudence and Earth Democracy that she describes as based on "local communities – organized on principles of inclusion, diversity, and ecological and social responsibility"^[11][12]

Thomas Berry introduced a philosophy and ethics of law concept called Earth jurisprudence that identifies the earth's laws as primary and reasons that everything by the fact of its existence, therefore, has an intrinsic right to be and evolve.^[5][6][7] Earth Jurisprudence has been increasingly recognized and promoted worldwide by legal scholars, the United Nations, lawmakers, philosophers, ecological economists, and other experts as a foundation for Earth-centered governance, including laws and economic systems that protect the fundamental rights of nature.^[12]

Second, support for rights of nature also is supported through the utilitarian argument that humanity can only thrive in the long term by accepting integrated co-existence of humans with the natural world.^[15] Berry noted that the concept of human well-being derived from natural systems with no fundamental right to exist is inherently illogical,^[2] and that by protecting nature's rights, humans advance their own self-interest.^[13][14]

The legal and philosophical concept of rights of nature offers a shift from a frame of nature as property or resource, to nature as an interconnected Earth community partner. This school of thought aims at following the same path that human rights movements have followed, where at first recognition of rights in the rightless appeared "unthinkable", but later matured into a broadly-espoused worldview.^[3]

Christopher Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California, wrote extensively on this topic in his seminal essay, "Should Trees Have Standing", cited by a U.S. Supreme Court dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton for the position that "environmental issues should be tendered by [nature] itself."^[a][4][16] As described by Stone and others, human rights have increasingly been "found" over time and declared "self-evident", as in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, even where essentially non-existent in the law.^[3][4] The successes of past and current human rights movements provide lessons for the current movement to widen the circle of Earth community to include natural systems and species populations as rights-bearing entities.^[9][17]

Underpinnings and development

Critique of anthropocentric legal systems

Proponents of a shift to a more environmentally protective system of law contend that current legal and economic systems fail because they consider nature fundamentally as property, which can be degraded for profit and human desire.^[2][18][19] They point out that the perspective of nature as primarily an economic resource already has degraded some ecosystems and species so significantly that now, prominent policy experts are examining "endangered species triage" strategies to decide which species will be let go, rather than re-examine the economics driving the degradation.^[20][21] While twentieth and twenty-first century environmental laws do afford some level of protection to ecosystems and species, it is argued that such protections fail to stop, let alone reverse, overall environmental decline, because nature is by definition subordinated to anthropogenic and economic interests, rather than biocentric well-being.^[1][22][23]

Rights of nature proponents contend that re-envisioning current environmental laws from a nature's rights frame demonstrates the limitations of current legal systems. For example, the U.S. Endangered Species Act prioritizes protection of existing economic interests by activating only when species populations are headed toward extinction.^[21] By contrast, a "Healthy Species Act" would prioritize achievement of thriving species populations and facilitate economic systems that drive conservation of species.^[21]

As another example, the European Union's Water Framework Directive of 2000, "widely accepted as the most substantial and ambitious piece of European environmental legislation to date",^[24] relies on a target of "good status" of all EU waters, which includes consideration of needed "ecological flows".^[25] However, decades after the Directive's adoption, despite scientific advances in identifying flow-ecology relationships, there remains no EU definition of "ecological flow", nor a common understanding of how it should be calculated.^[24][25] A nature's rights frame would recognize not only the existing human right to water for basic needs, but would also recognize the rights of waterways to adequate, timely, clean water flows, and would define such basic ecological flow needs accordingly.^[26]

Underlying science and ethics

Modern environmental laws began to arise in the 1960s out of a foundational perspective of the environment as best managed in discrete pieces.^[27] For example, United States laws such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and numerous others began to be adopted in the early 1970s to address various elements of the natural world, separately from other elements. Some laws, such as the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act, called for a more holistic analysis of proposed infrastructure projects and required the disclosure of expected negative environmental impacts. However, it did not require that actions be taken to address those impacts in order to ensure ecosystem and species health.^[21]

These laws reflected the science of the time, which was grounded in a reductionist analysis of the natural world; the modern, system-based understanding of the natural world, and the integrated place of humans with it, was still in development.^[28] The first major textbook on ecological science that described the natural world as a system rather than a collection of different parts, was not written until 1983.^[28][29]

The Gaia Hypothesis, which offered a scientific vision of the world as a self-regulating, complex system, first arose in the 1970s.^[30] Systems dynamics similarly began to evolve from a business focus to include socioeconomic and natural systems starting in the 1970s.^[31] Since then, scientific disciplines have been converging and advancing on the concept that humans live in a dynamic, relationship-based world that "den[ies] the possibility of isolation".^[32][28]

While science in the late twentieth century shifted to a systems-based perspective, describing natural systems and human populations as fundamentally interconnected on a shared planet,^[15] environmental laws generally did not evolve with this shift. Reductionist U.S. environmental laws passed in the early 1970s remained largely unchanged, and other national and international environmental law regimes similarly stopped short of embracing the modern science of systems.^[1]

Nineteenth century linguist and scholar Edward Payson Evans, an early rights of nature theorist and author of "the first extensive American statement of (...) environmental ethics”,^[4] wrote that each human is “truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and [the] attempt to set him up on an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious”.^[33][34][4]

Thomas Berry proposed that society's laws should derive from the laws of nature, explaining that "the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects".^[5] From the scientific perspective that all life arose from the context of the universe, Berry offered the ethical perspective that it is flawed to view humans as the universe's only subjects, with all other beings merely a collection of objects to be owned and used. Rather, consideration of life as a web of relationships extending back to a shared ancestry confers subject status to all, including the inherent rights associated with that status. Laws based on a recognition of the intrinsic moral value of the natural world, create a new societal moral compass that directs society's interactions with the natural world more effectively toward well-being for all.^[35][36]

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aldo_Leopold,_1946_%28cropped%29.jpg)

Aldo Leopold - a scientist and forester who advocated to "see land as a community to which we belong" rather than as "a commodity belonging to us"

Scientists who similarly wrote in support of expanded human moral development and ethical obligation include naturalist John Muir and scientist and forester Aldo Leopold. Leopold expressed that "[w]hen we see land as a community to which we belong", rather than "a commodity belonging to us", we can "begin to use it with love and respect". Leopold offered implementation guidance for his position, stating that a "thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."^[9][4][a] Berry similarly observed that "whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good."^[37][4] Physician and philosopher Albert Schweizer defined right actions as those that recognize a reverence for life and the "will to live".^[38][4]

The outgrowth of scientific and ethical advances around natural systems and species is a proposed new frame for legal and governance systems, one grounded in an ethic and a language that guide behavior away from ecological and social practices that ignore or minimize human-nature interconnections.^[39] Rather than a vision of merely "sustainable development", which reflects a frame of nature maintained as economic feedstock, scholars supporting rights of nature suggest that society is beginning to consider visions such as "thriving communities", where "communities" includes nature as a full subject, rather than simply an object to be used.^[40][41]

History

Common roots with indigenous worldviews

The ethical and philosophical foundation of a nature's rights legal theory and movement is a worldview of respect for nature, as contrasted with the "nature domination" worldview that underlies the concept of nature as object and property. Indigenous law professor John Borrows observed that "[w]ithin indigenous legal traditions, creation stories... give guidance about how to live with the world", rather than live at odds with it.^[42]A 2012 international Declaration of Indigenous Peoples found that modern laws destroy the earth because they do not respect the "natural order of Creation".^[43] The Declaration observed that humans "have our place and our responsibilities within Creation's sacred order"^[43] and benefit from "sustaining joy as things occur in harmony with the Earth and with all life that it creates and sustains".^[43]

Indigenous worldviews align with and have accelerated the development of rights of nature law, including inEcuador and Bolivia.^[44][45][46] Ecuador amended its constitution in 2008 to recognize the rights of nature in light of the perceived need to better protect and respect Pachamama, a term that embodies both the physical and the spiritual aspects of the natural world.^[12] Bolivia similarly amended its constitution and enacted nature's rights statutes to reflect traditional indigenous respect for Pachamama, and a worldview of natural systems and humans as part of one family.^[47]

New Zealand law professor Catherine Iorns Magallanes observed that traditional indigenous worldviews embody a connection with nature is so deep that nature is regarded as a living ancestor. From this worldview arises responsibilities to protect nature as one would a family member, and the need for a legal structure that reflects a primary frame of responsibilities to the natural world as kin.^[48]

Common roots with world religions

Many of the world's other religious and spiritual traditions offer insights consistent with a nature's rights worldview.^[49] Eastern religious and philosophical traditions embrace a holistic conception of spirituality that includes the Earth. Chinese Daoism and Neo-Confucianism, as well as Japanese Buddhism, teach that the world is a dynamic force field of energies known as bussho (Buddha nature or qi), the material force that flows through humans, nature, and universe. As the eleventh century pioneering Neo-Confucianist philosopher Zhang Zai explained, "that which extends throughout the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature".^[50]

In both Hinduism and Buddhism, karma ("action" or "declaration" in Sanskrit) reflects the reality of humanity's networked interrelations with Earth and universe.^[15] Buddhist concepts of “co-dependent arising” similarly hold that all phenomena are intimately connected. Mahayana Buddhism's "Indra's Net" symbolizes a universe of infinitely repeated mutual relations, with no one thing dominating.^[51][15]

Western religious and philosophical traditions have recognized the context of Earth and universe in providing spiritual guidance as well. From the Neolithic through the Bronze ages, the societies of "Old Europe" revered numerous female deities as incarnations of Mother Earth.^[28] In early Greece, the earth goddess Gaia was worshipped as a supreme deity.^[52] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato asserted that the "world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence (...) a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related".^[53][54] Medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas later wrote of the place of humans, not at the center of being, but as one part of an integrated whole with the universe as primary, stating that “The order of the universe is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things."^[2][55]

More recently, Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Catholic church, reflected that, "[t]he obedience to the voice of Earth is more important for our future happiness... than the desires of the moment. Our Earth is talking to us and we must listen to it and decipher its message if we want to survive."^[56] His successor, Pope Francis, has been particularly vocal on humanity's relationship with the Earth,^[57][58] describing how humans must change their current actions in light of the fact that "a true 'right of the environment' does exist".^[59] He warned against humanity's current path, stating that "the deepest roots of our present failures" lie in the direction and meaning of economic growth, and the overarching rule of a "deified market".^[57][60][58]

The Qur’an, Islam's primary authority in all matters of individual and communal life, reflects that "the whole creation praises God by its very being".^[61] Scholars describe the "ultimate purpose of the Shari'ah"^[62] as "the universal common good, the welfare of the entire creation,"^[62] and note that "not a single creature, present or future, may be excluded from consideration in deciding a course of action."^[62]

Bringing together Western and Indigenous traditions, Archbishop Desmond Tutu spoke of "Ubuntu", an African ethical concept that translates roughly to "I am because you are", observing that: "Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness... We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world."^[63][64]

Common roots with human rights

Human rights have been developing over centuries, with the most notable outgrowth being the adoption of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations in 1948. Key to the development of those rights are the concepts of natural rights, and rights of humans emanating from the existence of humanity.^[4]

Roderick Fraser Nash, professor of history and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, traced the history of rights for species and the natural world back to the thirteenth century Magna Carta's launch of the concept of "natural rights" that underlies modern rights discourse.^[4]

Peter Burdon, professor at the University of Adelaide Law School and an Earth Jurisprudence scholar, has expanded upon Nash's analysis, offering that seventeenth century English philosopher and physician John Locke's transformative natural rights thesis led to the American Revolution, through the concept that the British monarchy was denying colonists their natural rights.^[65] Building on that concept, U.S. President, attorney, and philosopher Thomas Jefferson argued that the "laws of nature and of nature's God" reveal "self-evident" truths that "all Men are created equal" in their possession of "certain unalienable rights", particularly "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". The 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen later recognized as well the "natural, inalienable and sacred rights of Man", adding that the "final end of every political institution is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of Man."^[65][4]

The expansion of rights continued out to animals, with eighteenth-nineteenth century English philosopher and legal theorist Jeremy Bentham claiming that the “day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny”.^[66][65] Nineteenth century linguist and scholar Edward Payson Evans observed that:^[34][4]

"[i]n tracing the history of the evolution of ethics we find the recognition of mutual rights and duties confined at first to members of the same horde or tribe, then extended to worshippers of the same gods, and gradually enlarged so as to include every civilized nation, until at length all races of men are at least theoretically conceived as being united in a common bond of brotherhood and benevolent sympathy, which is now slowly expanding so as to comprise not only the higher species of animals, but also every sensitive embodiment of organic life."^[34][4]

The 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations was another milestone, underpinned by the belief that fundamental human rights arise from "the fact of existing".^[10][2] The movement for rights of nature built on this belief, arguing that if "existence" is the defining condition for fundamental rights, this defining condition could not be limited to the rights of only one form of existence, and that all forms of existence should enjoy fundamental rights.^[4] For example, Aldo Leopold's land ethic explicitly recognized nature's "right to continued existence"^[9] and sought to "change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it".^[9]

Proponents of the rights of nature also contend that from the abolition of slavery, to the granting of the right to vote to women, to the civil rights movement, and the recognition of other fundamental rights, societies have continued to expand rights in parallel with a growing acceptance of the inherent moral worth of the potential new rights holders.^[3][67] And, that this expansion of the circle of community ought to continue to grow to encompass the natural world,^[9][68] a position that has seen growing acceptance in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.^[69][68][70]

Proponents suggest that rights derived from existence in nature do not confer human rights to all beings, but rather confer unique rights to different kinds of beings. Thomas Berry put forth the theory that rights "are species specific and limited"; that is, "rivers have river rights", "birds have bird rights", and "humans have human rights". In his view, the difference is "qualitative, not quantitative".^[5][3]

Extending this point, the common ethical and moral grounding of human rights and the rights of nature gives rise to the concept of "co-violations" of rights, defined as a "situation in which governments, industries, or others violate both the rights of nature and human rights, including indigenous rights, with the same action".^[71][72] For example, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, pollution from Texaco's (now Chevron) oil drilling operations from 1967 to 1992 resulted in an epidemic of birth defects, miscarriages, and an estimated 1,400 cancer deaths, that were particularly devastating to indigenous communities. These operations further caused more than one million acres of deforestation and polluted local waterways with 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and contaminants, severely damaging a formerly pristine rainforest of extraordinary biodiversity.^[71][73] Asserting that the same human actions that created such impacts violated the fundamental rights of both people and natural systems, it is argued that ethical and legal theories that recognize both sets of rights will better guide human behavior to recognize and respect humans' interconnected relationships with each other and the natural world.^[74]

As with the recognition of human rights, legal scholars find that recognition of the rights of nature alters the framework of human laws and practices.^[17][75] Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe theorized further that "choosing to accord nature a fraternal rather than an exploited role... might well make us different persons from the manipulators and subjugators we are in danger of becoming".^[76][77]

20th and 21st century developments

The adoption of the UDHR in 1948 formalized recognition of broad categories of inalienable human rights globally. These include recognition that "[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", that "[e]veryone has the right to life, liberty and security of person", and that "[e]veryone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted". Recognition of fundamental rights in "soft law" instruments such as the UDHR provided guidance to nations around the world, who have since developed constitutional provisions, statutes, court decisions, regulations, and other bodies of law based on the UDHR and the human rights it champions.^[17]

Decades later, USC law professor Christopher Stone called for recognition of the legal standing and associated rights of the natural world as well, consistent with the "successive extension of rights" throughout legal history.^[75][78] As was done in the UDHR, Stone outlined the necessary elements of nature's participation in human legal systems, describing such a legal system as necessarily including: recognition of injuries as subject to redress by public body, standing to institute legal actions (with guardians acting on behalf of the natural entity), redress calculated for natural entity's own damages, and relief running to the benefit of the injured natural entity.^[75][3]

In addition to Stone's legal work, other late twentieth and early twenty-first century drivers of the rights of nature movement include indigenous perspectives and the work of the indigenous rights movement;^[22][79] the writings of Arne Naess and the Deep Ecology movement;^[80][81] Thomas Berry's 2001 jurisprudential call for recognizing the laws of nature as the "primary text";^[2][82] the publication of Cormac Cullinan's Wild Law book in 2003, followed by the creation of an eponymous legal association in the UK;^[1] growing concern about corporate power through the expansion of legal personhood for corporations;^[2] adoption by U.S. communities of local laws addressing rights of nature; the creation of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature in 2010 (a nonprofit advancing rights on nature worldwide); and mounting global concerns with species losses, ecosystem destruction, and the existential threat of climate change.^[83][84]

These and other factors supported the development of the 2010 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME).^[85][86][87] The UDRME was adopted by representatives of 130 nations at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, convened in Bolivia following the concerns of many regarding the disappointing results of the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations.^[88][65] Just as the U.N. recognized human rights as arising from existence, so did the UDRME find that the "inherent rights of Mother Earth are inalienable in that they arise from the same source as existence".^[89] Like the UDHR, the UDRME defends the rights-bearing entity (nature and her elements) from the excesses of governing authorities. These rights include, among others, the recognition that "Mother Earth and all beings of which she is composed have... the right to life and to exist"^[89] as well as the "right to integral health".^[89] The UDRME adds that "[e]ach being has the right to a place and to play its role in Mother Earth for her harmonious functioning".^[89][1]

Just as the rights protected by the UDHR are enforceable by the "right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals",^[90] so too does the UDRME specifically require humans and their institutions to "recognize and promote the full implementation and enforcement of the rights and obligations recognized in this Declaration".^[89] The UDRME addresses enforcement by requiring "damages caused by human violations of the inherent rights"^[89] to be "rectified",^[89] with those responsible "held accountable".[88] Moreover, it calls on states to "empower human beings and institutions to defend the rights of Mother Earth and of all beings".^[89][12]

Bolivian President Evo Morales urged then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to make U.N. adoption of the UDRME a priority.^[91] While that recommendation remains to be addressed, since then the UDRME has served to inform other international and national efforts, such as a 2012 Resolution by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) proposing a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature.^[92] The Incorporation of the Rights of Nature was adopted at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii (2016).^[93][86][94]

As of 2021 rights of nature has been reflected in treaties, constitutions, court decisions, and statutory and administrative law at all levels of government.^[95][69] Craig Kauffman, political science professor at the University of Oregon, and scholar of nature's rights and global governance, contends that evolving rights of nature initiatives and networks represent an "important new global movement" arising from "an informal global governance system... being constructed by citizens disillusioned by the failure of governments to take stronger actions to address the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss".^[69]

Rights of nature law

The early 2000s saw a significant expansion of rights of nature law, in the form of constitutional provisions, treaty agreements, national and subnational statutes, local laws, and court decisions.^[69] As of 2021, nature's rights laws exist in 17 countries,^[96][70][97] including in Canada,^[98] seven Tribal Nations in the U.S. and Canada, and dozens of cities and counties throughout the United States.^[99][67][13] The total number of countries with either existing or pending rights of nature legal provisions was 28 as of 2019.^[69][70]

New Zealand - in 2012 a treaty agreement between the government and the indigenous group Maori iwi established the Whanganui River (top image), and its tributaries as a legal entity with its own standing.^{[100][48][99]} Similarly, Mount Taranaki (bottom image) was recognized in 2014 as "a legal personality, in its own right".^[101][102]

Treaties

New Zealand

Legal standing for natural systems in New Zealand arose alongside new attention paid to long-ignored treaty agreements with the indigenous Maori.^[103] In August 2012, a treaty agreement signed with the Maori iwi recognized the Whanganui River and tributaries as a legal entity, an "indivisible and living whole" with its own standing.^[104][100] The national Te Awa Tupua Act was enacted in March 2017 to further formalize this status.^[48][99]

In 2013, the Te Urewera Forest treaty agreement similarly recognized the legal personhood of the Forest,^[105][48] with the Te Urewera Act signed into law in 2014 to formalize this status. In 2017 a treaty settlement with the Maori was signed that recognized Mount Taranaki as "a legal personality, in its own right".^[101][102]

Each of these developments advanced the indigenous principle that the ecosystems are living, spiritual beings with intrinsic value, incapable of being owned in an absolute sense.^[106][107]

Constitutional law

Ecuador

Yasuní National Park, Ecuador

In 2008, the people of Ecuador amended their Constitution to recognize the inherent rights of nature, or Pachamama. The new text arose in large part as a result of cosmologies of the indigenous rights movement and actions to protect the Amazon, consistent with the concept of Sumac Kawsay ("buen vivir" in Spanish, "good living" in English), or encapsulating a life in harmony with nature with humans as part of the ecosystem.^{[108][109][110]} Among other provisions, Article 71 states that "Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes."^[111] The Article adds enforcement language as well, stating that "Any person... may demand the observance of the rights of the natural environment before public bodies",^[111] and echoing Christopher Stone, Article 72 adds that “Nature has the right to be completely restored... independent of the obligation... to compensate people”.^{[111][112][3]}

Judicial decisions

Turag River, near Dhaka, Bangladesh

Bangladesh

In 2019, the High Court of Bangladesh ruled on a case addressing pollution of and illegal development along the Turag River, an upper tributary of the Buriganga.

Among its findings, the high court recognized the river as a living entity with legal rights, and it further held that the same would apply to all rivers in Bangladesh. The court ordered the National River Protection Commission to serve as the guardian for the Turag and other rivers.^{[113][114][115]}

Colombia

Atrato River in Colombia - in a 2016 ruling by the Constitutional Court involving the river's pollution, the court stated that the river is a subject of rights, and that humans are "only one more event within a long evolutionary chain [and] in no way... owner of other species, biodiversity or natural resources, or the fate of the planet".^{[116][100][117]}

Colombia has not adopted statutes or constitutional provisions addressing nature's rights (as of 2019). However, this has not prevented Colombian courts from finding nature's rights as inherent. In a 2016 case, the Colombia Constitutional Court ordered cleanup of the polluted Atrato River, stating that nature is a "true subject of rights that must be recognized by states and exercised... for example, by the communities that inhabit it or have a special relationship with it”.^[117] The court added that humans are “only one more event within a long evolutionary chain [and] in no way... owner of other species, biodiversity or natural resources, or the fate of the planet".^{[116][100][117]}

In 2018, the Colombia Supreme Court took up a climate change case by a group of children and young adults that also raised fundamental rights issues. In addition to making legal findings related to human rights, the court found that the Colombian Amazon is a "'subject of rights', entitled to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration". It recognized the special role of Amazon deforestation in creating greenhouse gas emissions in Colombia, and as a remedy ordered the nation and its administrative agencies to ensure a halt to all deforestation by 2020. The court further allocated enforcement power to the plaintiffs and affected communities, requiring the agencies to report to the communities and empowering them to inform the court if the agencies were not meeting their deforestation targets.^[118][119]

Ecuador

A significant body of case law has been expanding in Ecuador to implement the nation's constitutional provisions regarding the rights of nature. Examples include lawsuits in the areas of biodigestor pollution, impaired flow in the Vilcabamba River, and hydropower.^[120][121]

India

Gangotri Glacier, a source of the Ganga river

The river Yamuna at Yamunotri Glacier

As in Colombia, as of 2019 no statutes or constitutional provisions in India specifically identified rights of nature. Nevertheless, the India Supreme Court in 2012 set the stage for cases to come before it on rights of nature, finding that "Environmental justice could be achieved only if we drift away from the principle of anthropocentric to ecocentric... humans are part of nature and non-human has intrinsic value."^{[122][123][124]}

The Uttarakhand High Court applied the principle of ecocentric law in 2017, recognizing the legal personhood of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and ecosystems, and calling them "living human entities" and juridical and moral persons.^{[125][126][100]} The court quickly followed with similar judgments for the glaciers associated with the rivers, including the Gangotri and Yamunotri, and other natural systems.^[127][128] While the India Supreme Court stayed the Ganga and Yamuna judgment at the request of local authorities, those authorities supported the proposed legal status in concept, but were seeking "implementation guidance".^[129]

National, sub-national, and local law

Bolivia

Following adoption of nature's rights language in its 2009 Constitution, in 2010 Bolivia's Legislature passed the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, Act No. 071. Bolivia followed this broad outline of nature's rights with the 2012 Law of Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well, Act. No. 300, which provided some implementation details consistent with nature's rights. It states in part that the "violation of the rights of Mother Earth, as part of comprehensive development for Living Well, is a violation of public law and the collective and individual rights".^[130] While a step forward, this enforcement piece has not yet risen to the level of a specific enforcement mechanism.^[131]

Mexico

State, regional, and local laws and local constitutional provisions have been arising in Mexico, including adoption in the constitutions of the Mexican states of Colima and Guerrero, and that of Mexico City.^{[132][13][133]}

Uganda

Part 1, Section 4 of Uganda's 2019 National Environment Act addresses the Rights of Nature, stating in part that "Nature has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution."^[134] Advocates who had sought inclusion of such language observed that "Ugandans' right to a healthy environment cannot be realised unless the health of Nature herself is protected," and that the language adoption reflected "recent gains for the growing African movement for Earth Jurisprudence".^[134]

United States

At the local level dozens of ordinances with rights of nature provisions have been passed as of 2019 throughout the United States, and in tribal lands located within the U.S. boundaries.^{[99][135][136]} Most were passed in reaction to a specific threat to local well-being, such as threats posed by hydrofracking, groundwater extraction, gravel mining, and fossil fuel extraction. For example, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania passed an anti-fracking law that included the following provision to buttress protections: "Natural communities and ecosystems... possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish." The ordinance continues that "Residents... shall possess legal standing to enforce those rights."^{[137][138][40]}

Santa Monica State Beach - in 2013 the city adopted a "Sustainability Rights Ordinance",^[139] recognizing the "fundamental and inalienable rights"^[139] of "natural communities and ecosystems"^[139][21]

Residents in Santa Monica, Californiaproactively sought to recognize nature's rights in local law after the U.S. Supreme Court's expansion of corporate rights inCitizens United v. FEC. In 2013 the Santa Monica City Council adopted a "Sustainability Rights Ordinance",^[139] recognizing the "fundamental and inalienable rights"^[139] of "natural communities and ecosystems"^[139] in the city to "exist and flourish".^[139] The ordinance emphasized that "[c]orporate entities... do not enjoy special privileges or powers under the law that subordinate the community's rights to their private interests".^[139] It specifically defined "natural communities and ecosystems" to include "groundwater aquifers, atmospheric systems, marine waters, and native species".^[139][21] Santa Monica updated its Sustainable City Plan in 2014 to reinforce its codified commitment to nature's rights. In 2018, the city council adopted a Sustainable Groundwater Management Ordinance that specifically referenced the inherent rights of the local aquifer to flourish.^[21]

International bodies and soft law

United Nations

Advancements during the early twenty-firstst century in international "soft law" (quasi-legal instruments generally without legally binding force) have precipitated broader discussions about the potential for integrating nature's rights into legal systems. The United Nations has held nine "Harmony with Nature" General Assembly Dialogues as of 2019 on Earth-centered governance systems and philosophies, including discussions of rights of nature specifically.^[140][141] The companion United Nations Harmony with Nature initiative compiles rights of nature laws globally and offers a U.N. "Knowledge Network" of Earth Jurisprudence practitioners across disciplines.^[142] These U.N. Dialogues and the Harmony with Nature initiative may provide a foundation for development of a United Nations-adopted Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature which, like the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, could form the foundation for rights-based laws worldwide.^[12] A model could be the 2010 UDRME, an informal, but widely-supported nature's rights agreement based on the UDHR.^[85]

International Union for Conservation of Nature

In 2012, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, the only international observer organization to the U.N. General Assembly with expertise in the environment) adopted a resolution specifically calling for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature.^[92] The IUCN reaffirmed its commitment to nature's rights at its next meeting in 2016, where the body voted to build rights of nature implementation into the upcoming, four-year IUCN Workplan.^[143] The IUCN's subgroup of legal experts, the World Commission on Environmental Law, later issued an "IUCN World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law" recognizing that "Nature has the inherent right to exist, thrive, and evolve".^[144][145]

Related initiatives

The development of stronger and more active transnational rights of nature networks during the early 2000s, is a likely cause for the greater adoption of those championed principles into law.^[69] This has occurred in close integration with other, system-changing initiatives and movements for rights, including: development and implementation of new economic and finance models that seek to better reflect human rights and nature's rights;^{[146][147][148]} indigenous leadership to advance both the rights of indigenous peoples and nature's rights;^{[149][150][151]} international social movements such as the human right to water;^[152][8] advancement of practical solutions consistent with a nature's rights frame, such as rewilding;^[153] and rights of nature movement capacity building, including through development of nature's rights movement hubs globally.^[154]

To illustrate implementation of nature's rights laws, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature has established International Rights of Nature Tribunals. These tribunals are a civil society initiative and they issue non-binding recommendations. The tribunals bring together advocates of rights of nature, human rights, and rights of indigenous peoples into a process similar to the Permanent Peoples' Tribunals.^[155] The goal of the tribunals is to provide formal public recognition, visibility, and voice to the people and natural systems injured by alleged violations of fundamental rights and marginalized in current law, and to offer a model for redress for such injuries.^{[156][157][158]}

As awareness of rights of nature law and jurisprudence has spread, a new field of academic research is developing, where legal scholars and other scholars have begun to offer strategies and analysis to drive broader application of such laws, particularly in the face of early implementation successes and challenges.^{[120][159][160]}

In popular culture

The 2018 documentary Rights of Nature: A Global Movement, directed by Isaac Goeckeritz, Hal Crimmel and Valeria Berros explores the challenges of creating new legal structures in relation to Rights of Nature.^[citation ^needed]

A documentary film entitled Invisible Hand about the rights of nature movement, directed by Joshua Boaz Pribanic and Melissa Troutman of Public Herald, was released in 2020, executive-produced and narrated by actor Mark Ruffalo.^[161] It won four Best Documentary Awards, with official selections at 11 film festivals.^[]

The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, examined relationships with and rights of trees.^[162]

Notable documents

Republic of Ecuador (2008). "Constitution, Chapter 7". (First constitutional provisions recognizing nature's rights)^[13][1][112]
Plurinational State of Bolivia (2010). "Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, Law No. 071 2010". (Early national law recognizing nature's rights)^[131]
Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia (2016). "Judgment in Case T-622 of 2016, Proceeding T-5.016.242" (PDF). (Stating that the contaminated Atrato River is a “true subject of rights”)^[116][100]
Supreme Court of the Republic of Colombia (2018). "Judgment in Case STC-4360-2018, Filing no. 11001-22-03-000-2018-00319-01". (Recognition of the inherent rights of the Colombian Amazon to a healthy climate)^[118][119]
Supreme Court of India (2012). "Judgment: T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad Vs. Union of India & Others". (Constitutional law case calling for a shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric principles of justice)^[122][123]
High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal (2017). "Judgment by High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal regarding Writ Petition (PIL) No. 126 of 2014". (Court decision recognizing the legal personhood of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in India)^[126][100]
High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal (2017). "Judgment by High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal regarding Writ Petition (PIL) No. 140 of 2015" (PDF). (Court decision recognizing the legal personhood of glaciers and associated natural systems in India)^{[127][128][129]}
New Zealand (2017). Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act. (First national law recognizing a river as a legal person)^[100]
New Zealand (2014). Te Urewera Act. (National law recognizing a former national park as a legal person)^{[105][48][102]}
Uganda (2019). "National Environment Act" (PDF). (First national law in Africa recognizing nature's rights)^[134]
"Constitution of Mexico City" (PDF). 2017. (Constitutional provision recognizing “ecosystems and species as a collective entity subject of rights” in one of the world's largest cities)^{[132][13][133]}
City of Pittsburgh, PA, U.S. (2010). "Municipal Code, Title 6, Art 1, Ch. 618, 'Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Drilling Ordinance:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". (Largest U.S. city to recognize nature's rights in law, as of 2019)^{[137][13][138]}
City of Santa Monica, CA, U.S. (2013). "Ordinance of the City Council of the City of Santa Monica Establishing Sustainability Rights, Santa Monica Municipal Code, Art. 4, Ch. 4.75, (April 9, 2013)". (First local law on the U.S. West Coast recognizing nature's rights)^[21]
World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (2010). "Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth". (First worldwide declaration of nature's rights; modeled on Universal Declaration of Human Rights)^[88][65][1]
International Union for Conservation of Nature (2012). "Resolution 100, 'Incorporation of the Rights of Nature as the organizational focal point in IUCN's decision making:{':(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". (Call for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature by international experts organization that holds both observer and consultative status at the United Nations)^[12]
International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Commission on Environmental Law (2017). "IUCN World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law" (PDF). (Statement by IUCN legal experts recognizing that “Nature has the inherent right to exist, thrive, and evolve”)^[140]

Notes

^ :{Jump up to::(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature#cite_ref-fn1_17-1) ^c(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature#cite_ref-fn1_17-2) The Sierra Club v. Morton case was decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1972. In it, Justice William O. Douglas wrote a dissenting opinion.^[4][16] His opinion highlighted the rights of nature and the intellectual contributions of Christopher Stone and Aldo Leopold:

"(...)Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. See Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? -- Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, 45 S.Cal.L.Rev. 450 (1972).(...).

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole -- a creature of ecclesiastical law -- is an acceptable adversary, and large fortunes ride on its cases. The ordinary corporation is a "person" for purposes of the adjudicatory processes, whether it represents proprietary, spiritual, aesthetic, or charitable causes.

So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes -- fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water -- whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger -- must be able to speak for the values which the river represents, and which are threatened with destruction.(...)

Ecology reflects the land ethic; and Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac 204 (1949), "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."

That, as I see it, is the issue of "standing" in the present case and controversy."^[16][4]

References

...

bolivia

buen vivir

https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/the-rights-of-nature-in-bolivia-and-ecuador/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_Rights_of_Mother_Earth

https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/ecocide/

expert panel of top international and environmental lawyers have begun working this month on a legal definition of "ecocide" with the goal of making mass ecological damage an enforceable international crime on par with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Assembled by the Stop Ecocide Foundation at the request of several Swedish parliamentarians, the initiative to criminalize the destruction of ecosystems at the global level has already garnered support from European countries as well as small island nations highly vulnerable to rising sea levels.

thedrafting panel is co-chaired by Philippe Sands QC, a professor at University College London, and Justice Florence Mumba, a former judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The November 20 launch date of the project coincided with the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, where the terms "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" were coined.

"The time is right," Sands saidrecently at an event commemorating the Nuremberg trials, "to harness the power of international criminal law to protect our global environment."...

Jalloh fla intl univ

11/18

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07214-2

A landmark climate-change lawsuit brought by young people against the US government can proceed, the Supreme Court said on 2 November. The case, Juliana v. United States, had been scheduled to begin trial on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon, in a federal district court. But those plans were scrapped last month after President Donald Trump's administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene and dismiss the case.

The plaintiffs, who include 21 people ranging in age from 11 to 22, allege that the government has violated theirconstitutional rights to life, liberty and propertyby failing to prevent dangerous climate change. They are asking the district court to order the federal government to prepare a plan that will ensure the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls below 350 parts per million by 2100, down from an average of 405 parts per million in 2017.

By contrast, theUS Department of Justice argues that “there is no right to ‘a climate system capable of sustaining human life’” — as the Juliana plaintiffs assert.

Although the Supreme Court has now denied the Trump administration's request to the dismiss the case, the path ahead is unclear. In its 2 November order, the Supreme Court suggested that a federal appeals court should consider the administration's arguments before any trial starts in the Oregon district court.

Lawyers for the young people said they would push the district court to reschedule the trial next week.

“The youth of our nation won an important decision today from the Supreme Court that shows even the most powerful government in the world must follow the rules and process of litigation in our democracy,” said Julia Olson, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, in a statement reacting to the Supreme Court decision.

A new generation

Although climate change is a global problem, lawyers around the world have brought climate-change-related lawsuits against local and national governments and corporations since the late 1980s. These suits have generally sought to force the sort of aggressive action against climate change that has been tough to achieve through political means.

Many of the cases have failed, but in 2015, a citizen’s group called the Urgenda Foundation won a historic victory against the Dutch government. The judge in that case ordered the Netherlands to cut its greenhouse-gas emissions to at least 25% below 1990 levels by 2020, citing the possibility of climate-related damages to “current and future generations of Dutch nationals” and the government’s “duty of care … to prevent hazardous climate change”. A Dutch appeals courtupheld the verdict last month.

Over the past few years, the Dutch case has emerged as a model for climate lawsuits in other countries, says Gillian Lobo, a lawyer who specializes in climate-change-related cases at ClientEarth in London. More recently, she says, the Juliana lawsuit has inspired its own copycats — some of which have progressed further than Juliana itself. “It is a global phenomenon,” Lobo says.

One case modelled on the Juliana lawsuit has already produced a striking victory. InJanuary, 25 young people sued the Colombian government for their right to a healthy environment, in a case called Demanda Generaciones Futuras v. Minambiente.

The Colombian Supreme Court found in the plaintiffs’ favour in April. Not only did it order the government to take steps to reduce deforestation and climate change, it also ruled that the Colombian Amazon rainforest is “a subject of rights” that is entitled to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration”.

Fuzzy future

The young plaintiffs in the Juliana case allege that they have already suffered harm as a result of climate change. Seventeen-year-old Jaime and her family left their home on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Cameron, Arizona, in 2011 because the natural springs on which they depended for water were drying up.Fifteen-year-old Jayden’s home in Louisiana was severely damaged by flooding in 2016, and 19-year-old Vic’s school in White Plains, New York, closed temporarily in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy hit.

US climate hawks hope that the Juliana plaintiffs will ultimately prevail, but President Donald Trump’s administration is mounting a multipronged defence. The Justice Department denies that the district court in Oregon has jurisdiction over the broad sweep of federal policies at issue, and that the rights to life, liberty and property set out in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution translate into the right to a stable climate.

In any case, the department argues, no meaningful redress is possible, given that drastically reducing emissions in the United States might not move the needle on climate change much if other countries’ greenhouse-gas output grows. This echoes the argument made in 2007 by the Supreme Court's chief justice, John Roberts, when he dissented from the court’s decision in a pivotal climate case, Massachusetts vs. Environmental Protection Agency. The court’s ruling, which Roberts protested, forced the agency to regulate carbon emissions as a pollutant.

Andrea Rodgers, co-counsel for the Julianaplaintiffs, says that the Trump administration hasn’t challenged the fact that humans are changing the climate. “They haven’t presented experts to contest what our scientists are saying about ice melt or sea-level rise or terrestrial impacts or how climate change happens or ocean acidification,” she says.

To win, Rodgers says, “we have to show that the United States government is liable, but also that there is a remedy that the judge can order”. The United States has seen its greenhouse-gas emissions drop in recent years, as the country shifts its energy mix away from coal and towards renewable sources, but as of 2016, it remains the second-largest emitter after China.

James Hansen, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York City and a long-time climate activist, is an expert witness in the case — but he is also a plaintiff, representing “future generations” not yet born. (His 20-year-old granddaughter, Sophie Kivlehan, is also a plaintiff.)

Hansen has been fighting for action on climate change since he first testified on the subject before the US Senate in 1988. He says that if the Julianaplaintiffs lose their case, he will simply try another way. “We need to win as soon as possible,” Hansen says, “but if we lose, we don’t give up — we come back with a stronger case.”

Nature 563, 163-164 (2018)

doi: 10.1038/d41586-018-07214-2

https://www.invisiblehandfilm.com/

INVISIBLE HAND is a “paradigm shifting” documentary about the creation of ‘Rights of Nature.’ The defining battle of our times where nature, democracy and capitalism face off in rural America.

SHORT SYNOPSIS

Produced by award-winning actor Mark Ruffalo, INVISIBLE HAND takes you behind the curtain of the global economy where ‘Rights of Nature’ becomes “capitalism’s one true opponent.”

In the fall of 2014, for the first time in United States history, an ecosystem filed to defend itself in a lawsuit claiming its ‘right to exist' in Grant Township, Pennsylvania. For attempting such a radical act, Grant’s rural community of 700 people were sued by a corporation, then by the state government, and are now locked in a battle to defend the watershed they call home through civil disobedience. The water they drink, the Rights to Nature laws they've passed are all on the line in this exclusive story.

In Toledo, Ohio an earth-shattering vote was passed to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), granting personhood to international waters.

Half a continent away in Standing Rock, North Dakota, the same industry threatening Grant Twp. is using militarized force against indigenous tribes and allies fighting to protect Mother Earth.

Activists leaving Standing Rock are rejoined on the Pennsylvania and New York border where the Seneca Nation of Indians aligns with communities in the Triple Divide to stop radioactive fracking waste from entering Ohi:yo’ waters. Terry Pegula, owner of Buffalo Bills and Sabres, threatens to sue INVISIBLE HAND filmmakers and whoever continues to speak out about his oil and gas company and their efforts.

The four, Grant Township, Lake Erie Bill of Rights, Defend Oh:yo’ and Standing Rock, are joined in an international fight to protect more than just water. They fight for their community, democracy, and for Nature as a living entity unto itself.

In the end, "Who will speak for Nature?"

https://fore.yale.edu/World-Religions/Indigenous/Engaged-Projects/Global-Alliance-Rights-Nature

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (the “Alliance”) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”. Rather than treating nature as property under the law, the time has come to recognize that natural communities have the right to exist, maintain and regenerate their vital cycles.

Our members are a diverse network of scientists, attorneys, economists, indigenous leaders, authors, spiritual leaders, business leaders, politicians, actors, homemakers, students, activists: people from all walks of life in over 100 countries on 6 continents of North and South America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia who are looking to transform our human relationship with our planet.

The Alliance held the International Rights of Nature Tribunal in Bonn, at the LVR Landesmuseum on the 7th and 8th of November 2017.

https://therightsofnature.org/

links:

Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment (AFTE)

Le Ciel Foundation

Cultural Conservancy

Dine Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (Dine CARE)

Environmental Monitoring by Indigenous Peoples in the Amazon

Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature

Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force (HETF)

Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN): https://fore.yale.edu/World-Religions/Indigenous/Engaged-Projects/Indigenous-Environmental-Network-IEN

Indigenous Traditions and Ecology Conference

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN): Spiritual Values of Nature

NYC Stands for Standing Rock

The Mountain Institute (TMI): Sacred Mountains Program

U'wa Defense Working Group: https://fore.yale.edu/World-Religions/Indigenous/Engaged-Projects/Uwa-Defense-Working-Group

Sacred Texts

yale

The U’wa, an indigenous community of approximately 5,000 people, have lived in the cloudforests of northeast Colombia for thousands of years. The U’wa territory is one of the most delicate and endangered ecosystems on earth. Over the past decade, the U’wa have been fighting to protect their land and traditional culture from the Colombian government and Occidental Petroleum, a United States based corporation that acquired a license in 1992 to drill for oil on U’wa sacred territory. In the U’wa worldview, oil is the blood of Mother Earth; to extract it is matricide. Because they believe that they are responsible for maintaining the delicate balance between the physical and material worlds, the U’wa see the oil drilling project as a matter of life or death. An U’wa statement delivered in 1998 states: “We will in no way sell our Mother Earth, to do so would be to give up our work of collaborating with the spirits to protect the heart of the world, which sustains and gives life to the rest of the universe, it would be to go against our own origins and those of all existence.” Having seen the effects of oil drilling in outlying territories (oil spills, pollution, deforestation, colonization, and military violence), the U’wa consider the drilling project tantamount to cultural and environmental genocide. Since 1999, the U’wa have protested the project through civil disobedience and other forms of peaceful protest such as spiritual fasting and permanent assembly of Traditional Leaders. Over the years, U’wa protests have been met with violent police repression, resulting in several deaths and dozens of injuries. Through their defense campaign, the U’wa seek to awaken others to the dangers of fossil fuel addiction, natural resource depletion, and environmental destruction and have garnered support in at least twenty countries worldwide.	The U’wa, an indigenous community of approximately 5,000 people, have lived in the cloudforests of northeast Colombia for thousands of years. The U’wa territory is one of the most delicate and endangered ecosystems on earth. Over the past decade, the U’wa have been fighting to protect their land and traditional culture from the Colombian government and Occidental Petroleum, a United States based corporation that acquired a license in 1992 to drill for oil on U’wa sacred territory. In the U’wa worldview, oil is the blood of Mother Earth; to extract it is matricide. Because they believe that they are responsible for maintaining the delicate balance between the physical and material worlds, the U’wa see the oil drilling project as a matter of life or death. An U’wa statement delivered in 1998 states: “We will in no way sell our Mother Earth, to do so would be to give up our work of collaborating with the spirits to protect the heart of the world, which sustains and gives life to the rest of the universe, it would be to go against our own origins and those of all existence.” Having seen the effects of oil drilling in outlying territories (oil spills, pollution, deforestation, colonization, and military violence), the U’wa consider the drilling project tantamount to cultural and environmental genocide. Since 1999, the U’wa have protested the project through civil disobedience and other forms of peaceful protest such as spiritual fasting and permanent assembly of Traditional Leaders. Over the years, U’wa protests have been met with violent police repression, resulting in several deaths and dozens of injuries. Through their defense campaign, the U’wa seek to awaken others to the dangers of fossil fuel addiction, natural resource depletion, and environmental destruction and have garnered support in at least twenty countries worldwide.
Religion	Indigenous Tradition
Geographic Location	Colombia
Duration of Project	None Listed
History	In the spring of 1992, Los Angeles based Occidental Petroleum signed a contract with the government of Colombia to begin oil exploration on U’wa territory. The contract violated a 1991 ruling that required community consent for oil exploration projects in indigenous territories. Led by Berito Kuwaru’wa, the U’wa launched an international campaign in opposition to the drilling project. In 1996, Kuwaru’wa appealed to corporate executives in Los Angeles by presenting U’wa cosmology in song, explaining that the U’wa territory is sacred and not for sale. Bowing under pressure from the U’wa, Occidental’s original partner, Royal Dutch/Shell, pulled out in 1995. After petitioning the Colombian Constitutional Court, the U’wa won a nullification of the license in 1997, but this decision was later overturned by the Colombian Council of State. A joint study between Harvard University and the Organization of the American States recommended the immediate and indefinite suspension of the project. In 1999, thirteen percent of Occidental’s shareholders supported a resolution asking Occidental to perform a risk assessment of the project. In March of 1999, a Colombian court issued an injunction to temporarily halt work at the site but the ruling was later overturned by the Superior Court of Colombia. Even though the company determined that drilling would obtain only three months worth of oil for the United States, the Colombian Ministry of the Environment approved a license for the project and drilling began in November 2000. In February and June of 2001, peaceful U’wa protests at the drilling site were violently disrupted by Colombian police, who killed several children and injured dozens of adults. Since its opposition to the drilling project began, U’wa resistance to corporate greed and global fossil fuel consumption has inspired a solidarity movement in more than twenty countries worldwide.
Mission Statement	None Listed
Partner Organizations	Amazon Watch Action Resource Center Amazon Alliance for Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of the Amazon Basin Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund Indigenous Environmental Network Project Underground Rainforest Action Network
Long-Term Goals	None Listed
Bibliography	None Listed
Additional Research Resources	None Listed
Contact Information	Association of Traditional Authorities of Ú’wa Office Mayor-U’wa Town Hall Center of Communitarian Development Street 4 no. 3-35 Cubará Boyacá, Colombia Ph: 9.78.892326 Fax: 9.78.892326 Email: uwaadmi@uwacolombia.org

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/29/lake-erie-bill-of-rights-ohio/

no lnx

HOW OHIO’S CHAMBER OF COMMERCE KILLED AN ANTI-POLLUTION BILL OF RIGHTS

H. Claire Brown

August 29 2019, 5:00 a.m.

In partnership with

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, environmental activists in Ohio were alarmed by the passage of a mysterious state budget amendment that would close a new avenue for residents to sue polluters. The provision invalidated a landmark anti-pollution initiative passed by Toledo voters just a few months before. Now, emails obtained in a public records request reveal that theOhio Chamber of Commerce secured the cooperation of a key Republican lawmaker in a successful effort to slip the amendment into an appropriations bill at the eleventh hour.

The emails depict the chamber’s environmental policy director requesting a last-minute meeting with state Rep. Jim Hoops to discuss the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the newly minted ballot initiative allowing citizens to sue polluters on behalf of Lake Erie. A legislative aide responded quickly, scheduling a same-day meeting. Despite the chamber director’s admission that his proposal would need to be submitted after the legislature’s deadline, the aide produced draft amendment language to share with him three weeks later. The chamber’s subsequent revisions made their way into the final bill, effectively nullifying the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“This shows the influence of the Chamber of Commerce writing our laws and undermining the democracy of the people of Toledo,” said Bill Lyons, a board member of the Ohio Community Rights Network, an environmental advocacy organization. After the May vote, Lyons filed a series of public records requests to try to figure out which lawmaker introduced the amendment. The emails were provided to The Intercept and The New Food Economy by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, an affiliate of the Ohio Community Rights Network.

[pix FILE - In this Aug. 3, 2014 file photo, a sample glass of Lake Erie water is photographed near the City of Toledo water intake crib on Lake Erie, off the shore of Curtice, Ohio. Scientists are predicting a "significant" algae bloom will form this summer on western Lake Erie, a continuing health hazard in a region where algae toxins forced a temporary tap water shutdown in 2014. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari, File) A glass of water sampled near Toledo’s water intake crib on Lake Erie, off the shore of Curtice, Ohio, on Aug. 3, 2014. Photo: Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP]

IN FEBRUARY, MORE than 60 percent of participants in a special election in Toledo voted to establish a Bill of Rights for Lake Erie. It was a unique ballot question that would grant Lake Erie the right to “exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.” The intent was to give Lake Erie and its human allies legal standing to file lawsuits against polluters.

Organizers in Ohio launched their efforts to pass the initiative after a toxic algal bloom — caused by fertilizer and manure runoff from upstream farms — rendered Toledo’s water undrinkable and largely unusable (some residents were advised not to shower) for a few days in 2014. Tish O’Dell, a state organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, said residents spent two years trying to persuade the state government to take action to prevent future issues.

In Ohio, however, the farm runoff largely responsible for polluting Lake Erie is minimally regulated. Farmers in the state also benefit from key legal protections that limit their vulnerability to pollution-related lawsuits.Ohio has a so-called right-to-farm law, which dramatically limits neighbors’ ability to win lawsuits alleging that farm pollution unfairly impacts their quality of life. (Hoops appears to have introduced another amendment that expands the definition of farmland protected under the state’s right-to-farm law; that amendment passed this summer as well, further narrowing the legal pathways advocates might use to limit agricultural runoff.) And at the federal level, the Clean Water Act has long exempted most agricultural operations from robust regulation.

For all these reasons, advocates came to believe that existing legal frameworks would never sufficiently protect the lake and those who live near it. By 2016, they were ready to try something new. After O’Dell and her colleague Thomas Linzey gave a presentation on so-called rights-of-nature laws at Bowling Green University, Toledo activists approached them about devising a plan for Lake Erie. The group headed to a nearby pub.

“That’s actually how the Lake Erie Bill of Rights hatched,” O’Dell said. “It was on a cocktail napkin at the bar.”

After its passage, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights was immediately challenged in federal court. The next day, the Drewes Farm Partnership had filed a 24-page lawsuit arguing that protections for the lake could mean financial ruin for the farm’s business. That lawsuit is ongoing. Then, in May, the eleventh-hour amendment invalidating the lake’s rights found its way into the House version of the state’s budget.

The Chamber of Commerce asked for the addition of text that would more directly refute the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

It all started with an email from the Ohio Chamber of Commerce. The chamber’s director of energy and environmental policy, Zack Frymier, wrote to request a meeting with Hoops, the state House representative, on April 11, a few weeks before the vote. (Hoops is chair of the Ohio House Finance Subcommittee on Agriculture, Development, and Natural Resources.)

“I’m hoping to find some time (like everyone else) to run something by Chairman Hoops regarding the Lake Erie Bill of Rights that passed in Toledo in February,” Frymier wrote. “We have some language that we’d request to be considered for the budget. Though obviously it would have to be submitted after tomorrow’s deadline we’d still like to have a conversation.”

A legislative aide replied promptly, arranging a meeting with Hoops for 4:00 p.m. that day. Despite the short notice — it was already nearly 3:00 p.m. — Frymier quickly and enthusiastically responded that he’d be there.

A few weeks later, the aide got back to Frymier with draft text of the amendment, asking if the wording made sense to him. Frymier then asked for the addition of text that would more directly refute the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

“Language in this amendment stating that [nature and ecosystems] do not have standing is essential to what we’re trying to accomplish,” Frymier wrote on May 2.

The amendment’s final text includes the additional statement Frymier asked for: “Nature or any ecosystem does not have standing to participate in or bring an action in any court of common pleas.”

The amendment was reported by local media on May 8. The next day, the state House passed its version of the bill. Lyons, the Community Rights Network board member, later testified in front of the state Senate, asking legislators to strike the amendment from the final budget. His efforts were unsuccessful and, after a few weeks of negotiation, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the measure into law.

Lyons said he was surprised by the degree of collaboration between the Chamber of Commerce and Hoops’s subcommittee. “The fact that they would run that language specifically by them — I mean, who else gets that opportunity?” he said. (Neither the Ohio Chamber of Commerce nor Hoops’s office responded to requests for comment.)

Business advocates — primarily the fossil fuel giant BP, which has fracking interests in the state — spent more than $300,000 to campaign against the Lake Erie Bill of Rights prior to its passage in Toledo. The coalition advocating in its favor, Toledoans for Safe Water, spent less than $6,000, according to Great Lakes Now.

Municipalities around the nation have been slowly adopting rights-of-nature ordinances for more than a decade. Pittsburgh banned fracking using this legal framework in 2010. More recently, a county in Oregon voted to ban aerial pesticide spraying the same way.

Rights-of-nature laws likely face a long road ahead. If the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is any indication, many may be tied up in lawsuits for years to come.

For O’Dell, the Ohio organizer, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is already a win regardless of its fate. “The people kept fighting to get it on the ballot. They defeated big corporate money. They won, and they’re still fighting,” she said. “So I don’t care what happens — they have ignited interest all around the world.”

nature rights person

Utah Supports “Personhood” for Corporations, but Maybe Not Forests

New state bill targets a growing “rights of nature” movement.

S1: The Forest for the Trees

Basic tenets

Underpinnings and development

Critique of anthropocentric legal systems

Underlying science and ethics

History

Common roots with indigenous worldviews

Common roots with world religions

Common roots with human rights

20th and 21st century developments

Rights of nature law

Treaties

New Zealand

Constitutional law

Ecuador

Judicial decisions

Bangladesh

Colombia

Ecuador

India

National, sub-national, and local law

Bolivia

Mexico

Uganda

United States

International bodies and soft law

United Nations

International Union for Conservation of Nature

Related initiatives

In popular culture

Notable documents

See also

Notes

References

A new generation

Fuzzy future

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