Rights of Nature

We are Nature.
Changing Our Community Practices and the Law.

The rule of three make for a simple but effective way to demonstrate why we are nature and why a rights of nature legal framework is necessary:

  • How long can you go without breathing? 3 minutes
  • How long can you go without water? 3 days
  • How long can you go without food? 3 weeks

Though this sits more in the framework of what we as humans get from nature, it should also be seen as how we are linked to, part of, and reliant on the natural world which includes all the people we interact with on a daily basis and the non-human world that provides for us and every other living being.

When what we call “nature” isn’t healthy, well, neither are we. Yet our culture, economy, and legal system is arranged in a manner that separates people from and then above the rest of the planet. This artificial belief has managed to cause real damage and destruction of the planet’s ability to sustain life. What people, especially the people controlling government and business, have miscalculated is that if we behave in this manner much longer it will be “nature” that prevails not us. The good news is despite such unnatural behavior, “nature” is looking to collaborate not compete with us.

What Are the
Rights of Nature?

At this point in time it should be well understood that it is old news that environmental degradation is advancing around the world and within our own backyards at an alarming rate. Human behavior is driving major planetary catastrophe for other species and whole ecosystems. For this reason, there is a growing recognition that we must fundamentally change the relationship between humankind and nature.

Making this fundamental shift means acknowledging our dependence on nature and respecting our need to live in harmony with the natural world as a community that is part of the natural world. To set the tone and create guideposts and limits for human enterprise means putting the rights of ecosystems at the center but intimately connected to all the related natural communities including humans. Nature’s rights are human rights.

In basic legal form rights of nature laws address nature as a whole, via a distinct ecosystem, or spotlighting a particular community or species and defining intrinsic rights. The laws then define aspects of representation, enforcement, penalties, and directives. The way in which rights of nature laws have come into being have been by legislation and court rulings.

It is thanks to CELDF’s significant work with rights of nature that the global Rights of Nature movement is gaining momentum. Though the United States still has the most proposed and adopted rights of nature laws (the overwhelming majority because of CELDF), the rest of the world is catching up to and passing the United States, especially in the realm of legal validation and enforcement. This is both good and bad. In the end it’s not a competition on the creation of, adoption, and enforcement of rights of nature laws. The more, well designed, and seriously accepted rights of nature legal examples there are from whatever part of the world, is good for rights of nature as a whole to be how we act in right-relationship vs. the way it is currently oriented which is about people taking from nature and in the process destroying its ability to provide. The bad is that there is much more to be done in the United States to institute rights of nature, especially as we not only witness but experience  first hand the magnitude and frequency of devastating ecological events affecting every part of the country.

About CELDF’s Center for the Rights of Nature

CELDF is assisting civil society, indigenous peoples, communities, and governments to advance laws and policies for the protection of Nature and the environment. This includes providing legislative and policy drafting, legal research, public engagement and education, and trainings.

CELDF has worked with dozens of communities in the United States as well as with organizations and governments in Ecuador, India, Nepal, Australia, Cameroon, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Kenya, Canada, and other countries to establish rights of nature laws.

Image credit: Max Wilbert

CELDF’s Rights of
Nature Highlights

2006

Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in the U.S., banned the dumping of toxic sewage sludge as a violation of the Rights of Nature. Tamaqua is the very first place in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in law thanks to the assistance from CELDF.

2008

CELDF was invited to meet with the Ecuador Constituent Assembly as they drafted a new constitution. We assisted the Assembly with constitutional provisions regarding Nature’s defense. Ecuadorians adopted their new constitution by an overwhelming majority, making Ecuador the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its constitution.

2010

Bolivia hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. At the conference CELDF assisted in drafting the proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, modeled on the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights. The Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth has been presented to the U.N. General Assembly for its consideration.

2014

Grant Township, in the State of Pennsylvania, enacted a CELDF-drafted Community Bill of Right, recognizing the Rights of Nature. An oil and gas corporation sued the community to overturn the law (that lawsuit is still active – over 10 years later). In 2020, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) revoked a permit for a frack waste injection citing the township’s law as the reason. In 2023, the injection well was plugged because of evidence that it was likely to leak.

2016

CELDF assisted the Green Party of England and Wales to develop a Rights of Nature policy for their national party platform. The policy was adopted in February 2016.

2018

The White Earth band of the Chippewa Nation adopted the “Rights of the Manoomin” law securing legal rights of Manoomin, or wild rice, a traditional staple crop of the Anishinaabe people. This is the first law to secure legal rights of a particular plant species, with CELDF assisting in the drafting of the legal language.  Rights of Manoomin was also adopted by the 1855 Treaty Authority.

2019

Toledo, Ohio adopted the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBoR)– the first Rights of Nature law for a specific ecosystem and what has become recognized as a breakthrough moment for rights of nature globally. CELDF assisted in the drafting, adoption, and defense of LEBoR.

2024/5

Inspired by the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, the Great Lakes Bill of Rights was introduced into the state legislature of New York Great. The bill was reintroduced in 2025 and includes all watersheds and waterways in the state being recognized as holders of legal rights. 

Other significant rights of nature laws and rulings

Ecuador

2011


The Provincial Justice Court of Loja ruled in favor of the Vilcabamba River. This marked the first time since that a court upheld Nature’s constitutional right to protection.

2022


The Constitutional Court of Ecuador upheld the rights of the Los Cedros Forest in a landmark decision that is explicit in the language of upholding the Rights of Nature and demonstrates what it looks like in legal language to uphold the rights of a forest over a corporate project.


Colombia

2016


Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Rio Atrato possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration,” and established joint guardianship for the river shared by indigenous people and the national government.

2018


The Colombian Supreme Court recognized the Colombian Amazon as a “subject of rights.”


Spain

2020


The Spanish municipality of Los Alcázares approved an initiative to recognize the rights of Mar Menor, a lagoon.


Peru

2024


The Superior Court of Justice of Loreto, Peru ruled in favor of recognizing the Marañón River, a vital tributary flowing through Peruvian lands, as an entity with inherent rights, including the right to exist, flow, and remain free of contamination.

Story about CELDF’s Rights of Nature logo

We at CELDF are honored and inspired by the talent and work of Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo. Together they make up the group Talking Wings along with being staunch advocates for Rights of Nature in their own community along the St. Lawrence River.

Blake is a filmmaker, illustrator and author and Tzintzun is an environmental artist-scholar and story weaver, striving to plant the seeds of a regenerative future. This amazingly creative team, who also serve on CELDF’s Partner-Advisor Committee, was able to take CELDF’s verbal description of our Rights of Nature work and transform it into creative illustrations and logos to convey our message visually.

It is our hope that their amazing artwork inspires you to continue to protect your community and the amazing ecosystems that you are interconnected with, and to remind you that CELDF is here to assist and support you moving forward.

Illustration by Blake Lavia

Fight for the rights of nature, today.

Corporate-claimed “rights” to profits come at the cost of ecosystem rights to flourish. Please give today to help CELDF advance Rights of Nature. CELDF uses every dollar of your donation for this fight.

FAQs

  • What do we mean when we say that nature has rights?

    Under the current system of law in almost every country, nature is considered to be property. Something that is considered property confers upon the property owner the right to damage or destroy it. Thus, those who “own” wetlands, forestland, and other ecosystems and natural communities, are largely permitted to use them however they wish, even if that includes destroying the health and well-being of nature.

     

    When we talk about the Rights of Nature, it means recognizing that ecosystems and natural communities are not merely property that can be owned. Rather, they are entities that have an independent and inalienable right to exist and flourish.

     

    Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature change the status of ecosystems and natural communities to being recognized as rights-bearing entities. As such, they have rights that can be enforced by people, governments, and communities on behalf of nature.

  • Why do we need to adopt new legal structures recognizing Rights of Nature?

    By most every measure, the environment today is in worse shape than when the major environmental laws were adopted in the United States over forty years ago. Since then, countries around the world have sought to replicate these laws. Yet, species extinction is accelerating, global warming is far more advanced than previously believed, deforestation continues around the world, and overfishing the world’s oceans has caused the collapse of many fisheries.

     

    These environmental laws – including the federal Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws – legalize environmental harms. They regulate how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur under law. Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, our environmental laws allow and permit it.

    In addition, under commonly understood terms of preemption, once these activities are legalized by federal or state governments, local governments are prohibited from banning them.

     

    Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature begin with a different premise: Ecosystems and natural communities have the right to exist and flourish. People, communities, and governments have the authority to defend those rights on behalf of ecosystems and natural communities.

  • Where have laws recognizing the Rights of Nature been adopted?

    CELDF has assisted the first communities in the United States, as well as Ecuador, to develop groundbreaking Rights of Nature laws.

     

    The first laws establishing legal structures that recognized the Rights of Nature were adopted by local municipalities in the United States in 2006. Tamaqua Borough, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, was the first community to enact the Rights of Nature. Since then, more than three dozen communities have adopted such laws. In November 2010, the City of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the first major municipality in the United States to recognize Rights of Nature.

     

    In September 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize Rights of Nature in its constitution. Bolivia has also established Rights of Nature laws.

  • What rights do Rights of Nature laws recognize?

    The earliest Rights of Nature laws recognized the right of ecosystems to “exist and flourish.” Others, including the Ecuadorian constitutional provisions promulgated in 2008, recognize the right of nature to exist, persist, evolve, and regenerate.

     

    These laws also recognize the right of any person or organization to defend, protect, and enforce those rights on behalf of nature, and for payment of recovered damages to government to provide for the full restoration of nature.

  • Doesn’t recognizing Rights of Nature just add an additional layer of regulation?

    No. Current environmental regulatory structures are mostly about “permitting” certain harms to occur, such as fracking, mining, and factory farming. They act more to legalize the harmful activities of corporations and other business entities than to protect our natural and human communities.

     

    Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature are different. They establish a basic principle of rights, which requires laws and regulations to work within that framework to uphold those rights. For example, communities that have enacted Rights of Nature laws are empowered to reject governmental actions permitting unwanted and damaging development which would violate these rights. Rights of Nature laws enable people, communities, and ecosystems themselves to defend and enforce such rights. Without the ability to do so, those ecosystems would be destroyed. Today, CELDF is serving as legal counsel for ecosystems, as well as communities, to defend the rights of watersheds to exist and flourish.

    Although people have been talking about “sustainable development” for decades, very little has been done to change the structure of law to actually achieve that goal. Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature finally codify the concept of sustainable development. They disallow activities that would interfere with the functioning of natural systems that support human and natural life.

  • What happens when the Rights of Nature and human rights conflict?

    When different human rights conflict, a court weighs the harms to the interests, and then decides how to balance them. The same thing happens when the Rights of Nature conflict with human rights.

     

    Given that ecosystems and nature provide a life support system for humans, their interests must, at times, override other rights and interests. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a habitable planet to support our continued existence.

     

    Of course humans are part of nature as well, which means that human needs must also be considered when the rights and interests of ecosystems come into conflict with ours.

     

    Furthermore, many nations have expanded their body of legal rights to recognize a human right to a healthy environment. This includes a number of European nations, including Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, and Finland.

     

    The recognition of such rights should mean that the highest legal protection is implemented and enforced. However, over recent decades, as ecosystems and species around the globe have been pushed toward collapse and global warming has accelerated, it has become increasingly clear that fulfilling the human right to a healthy environment is unachievable without a fundamental change in the relationship between humankind and nature.

     

    Thus, implementing and fulfilling a true human right to a healthy environment is dependent on the health of the natural environment itself. The human right to a healthy environment can only be achieved by securing the highest protections for the natural environment – by recognizing in law the right of the environment itself to be healthy and thrive.

  • Doesn’t this mean that rocks must be given lawyers?

    No, but it does mean that the rights of ecosystems and natural communities are enforceable independently of the rights of people who use them. That means that people within a community could step “into the shoes” of a mountain, stream, or forest ecosystem, and advocate for the rights of those natural communities. It calls for a system of jurisprudence in which those ecosystems are actually “seen” in court. Damages are assessed according to the costs of restoring the ecosystem to its pre-damaged state.

  • What is the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth?

    In April 2010, Bolivia hosted the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. At the conference, CELDF assisted in drafting the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Modeled on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Declaration has been forwarded to the United Nations for consideration by the U.N. General Assembly. On April 20, 2011, the General Assembly hosted an Interactive Dialogue entitled “Ways to promote a holistic approach to sustainable development in harmony with nature.” The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature was presented during the session.

CELDF is fully committed to
protecting ecosystems,
human rights,
and self-determination.

We need your support in taking paradigm change from idea to reality while there is still time.

Feature photo by Jeffrey St. Clair

May 12, 2025 by Caitlin Hoyland, published by CounterPunch

The Earth is “on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster,” according to “The 2024 State of the Climate Report.” Sounding the alarm on the “emergency” we find ourselves in, the report warns that the situation can no longer be ignored as “the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled.”

The scale of environmental degradation is no longer just a question of unsustainable practices; it is a direct violation of the Earth’s right to exist, regenerate, and thrive. What we are witnessing is ecocide—the extensive, systematic destruction of the natural environment.

There is a critical need for a movement to recognize nature as a legal entity with rights. Just as human rights are enshrined in law to protect individuals, the rights of the natural world also need to be legally acknowledged.

This is where the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) becomes so significant. CELDF has supported communities across the world in advancing the rights of nature, from local efforts to larger national and international movements.

How Ecuador is Setting an Example for Upholding the Rights of Nature

“Rights of Nature is about balancing what is good for human beings against what is good for other species, what is good for the planet as a world. It is the holistic recognition that all life, all ecosystems on our planet, are deeply intertwined. Rather than treating Nature as property under the law, Rights of Nature acknowledges that Nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles,” explains the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

Among its many successes, in 2008, CELDF supported Ecuador in becoming the first country in the world to include the rights of nature in its constitution. This model was replicated by Italy, which included protection of the environment in its constitution in 2022.

Pointing to how one step in the right direction can inspire other nations to do the same, CELDF stated, “Since CELDF assisted the people of Ecuador to amend their constitution to include rights of nature in 2008, the movement has seen hundreds of other laws passed in countries like Columbia, New Zealand, and Canada.”

These rights have helped Ecuador protect its wildlife and forests. In December 2021, “the Constitutional Court applied the rights of nature to prohibit mining in the Los Cedros Protected Forest,” according to Earth.Org. And in 2022, Ecuador became the first country to recognize the legal rights of animals in a landmark ruling.

These rights are especially important as “Ecuador is among the five most deforested countries in Latin America,” said Natalia Greene, Ecuadorian activist and environmental leader, in a 2023 Mongabay article.

CELDF Helps Communities in the U.S.

CELDF has also been instrumental in initiating similar efforts across the United States, such as in Pennsylvania, where communities have used local ordinances to assert nature’s rights and challenge corporate polluters.

“For two decades, CELDF has worked alongside hundreds of communities to advance rights-based laws protecting communities from factory farming, land application of sewage sludge, fracking, and other harms, by recognizing democratic and environmental rights. In Pennsylvania, communities joined together to form the Pennsylvania Community Rights Network (PACRN) in 2010, which partnered with CELDF and others to draft language for the state amendment,” the organization’s website stated.

These efforts led to Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvania passing a rights of nature law in 2006, “the first time rights of nature were recognized in any western legal system,” according to CELDF.

The fight to protect nature by local communities led to another win in March 2025. New York introduced the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights. If this law is passed, it “would be the first ever state-level ‘rights of nature’ law in the United States. It would recognize ‘unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate and be restored’ for the Great Lakes and other watersheds and ecosystems throughout the state,” stated the CELDF.

Through their advocacy, education, and legal support, organizations like CELDF are leading the way in empowering communities to challenge the systems perpetuating environmental harm and to restore balance with the natural world.

The growing movement to recognize the rights of nature represents not only a legal shift but a radical transformation in how we perceive our relationship with the planet.

Why These Legal Protections Are Critical

Despite the looming climate crisis that is already leading to massive destruction, the war economy continues with business as usual, driving record profits at the cost of catastrophic heatwaves, floods, and extreme weather that threaten the planet’s stability and global security. This exploitative system treats nature as a resource to be consumed and discarded, disproportionately harming the global poor. While markets attempt to appease eco-conscious consumers with greenwashed products that disguise their harmful impact, the underlying destructive processes remain unchanged.

To change this status quo, a growing momentum is calling for ecocide to be recognized as an international crime, with the late environmental lawyer Polly Higgins playing a pivotal role in advocating for ecocide to be a fifth crime against peace alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression.

If we continue to treat nature as a commodity to be exploited, we are not just causing irreversible harm—we are committing an act of violence against the very life-support systems that sustain us. This is why the push to ensure the rights of nature is critical.

Such a shift would radically transform our relationship with the planet, making the destruction of ecosystems as condemnable as the violation of human rights. We would recognize nature as a living, breathing entity that demands respect, protection, and preservation for future generations. This mindset is reflected in many Indigenous philosophies and Buddhist teachings, which view all living beings as interconnected. These worldviews hold that our survival depends on the health of the planet and that nature has intrinsic value beyond its utility to human beings.

The movement for the legal recognition of nature’s rights is deeply rooted in the need to bring about a decolonial shift. Decolonialism seeks to undo the harm caused by colonial systems that commodify nature and subjugate Indigenous knowledge and practices.

As pointed out by plant biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, who combines her academic background in botanical science and her background as an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, this shift would restore the “grammar of animacy,” leading to nature being recognized and understood as kin, rather than as property, thus dismantling the Western ideology of individualism and hierarchy.

Caitlin Hoyland is a writer and human rights advocate interning with CODEPINK’s Local Peace Economy program. She has written extensively on conflict, displacement, and social justice.

View Originial Source

Contact: Ben Price, CELDF Education Director

BenPrice@CELDF.org

717-254-3233

“They want this to fail” says former UN program head

NEW YORK — Dozens of activists for the rights of nature who traveled to the United Nations to participate in a high-level meeting were unexpectedly barred from speaking on April 22nd, Earth Day, due to a supposed “security breach.” 

The attendees, each of whom was personally invited by the Bolivian Foreign Minister, had previously been cleared by UN security personnel and issued access passes. Many had traveled thousands of miles — coming from Brazil, Poland, Canada, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Colombia — to attend the meeting. 

Callie Veelenturf, a rights of nature advocate and Executive Director of The Leatherback Project, one of a handful of the attendees who was allowed to speak, observed during the meeting that the silencing was ordered by the President of the UN General Assembly. She also observed handwritten notes indicating that pressure from unnamed Republicans may have been involved in the last-minute cancellation.

According to Maria Mercedes Sanchez, the retired 30 year head of the United Nations Harmony with Nature Programme, powerful elements within the UN and the United States are strongly opposed to the rights of nature. “There are many indications that they want this to fail,” she stated after the event.

Hans Leo Bader, an organizer with the Citizens’ Initiative for the Rights of Nature in Bavaria, was blunt in his message to supporters after the meeting. “Don’t trust international summits and diplomatic showpieces,” Bader said. “Real change grows from below.”

Ben Price, Education Director at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund and author of the first rights of nature law passed in the United States in 2006, was planning to speak about a new rights of nature law his organization helped draft which is currently in the New York State legislature. But even as a major story of the rights of nature movement that highlights the New York bill was published in Rolling Stone magazine that day, Price’s opportunity to speak was cut short.

He says that UN dialogues like this are mostly a waste of time, and combined with state and federal efforts to pre-empt local decision making and undermine democracy, are one reason why his organization is shifting its orientation towards direct resistance activities in addition to bottom-up rights of nature campaigns.

“This UN program has been locked in cyclical bureaucracy for nearly two decades,” Price says. “At a certain point, in the face of failure to make progress and direct slaps in the face like this, we have to give up on these institutions and focus exclusively on grassroots action.”

###

About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

CELDF is a nationwide community of organizers, lawyers, and partners who educate, agitate, and organize to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s reciprocal relationship with the Earth. For over 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate exploitation, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-govern through systems grounded in ecological balance and collective power.

UPDATE: This story has been covered on Censored News and the Columbus Free Press.

Feature image: Lake Huron, shown here, could be conferred legal rights under a new bill put forth in the New York State Assembly. Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

As the Trump administration pushes the climate crisis to a breaking point, a novel legal tactic is gaining momentum in the fight.

Will the Great Lakes, one of the natural wonders of the United States, be allowed to go to court to defend their rights to exist on equal terms with the human race? Last month, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly granting them and all other bodies of water in New York those legal rights. The waters, the bill declares, “shall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist […] free from human violations.”

Read full article from its original source

Feature photo by moerwijk on Unsplash

Contacts:

Tish O’Dell, CELDF Consulting Director

Tish@CELDF.org, 440-552-6774

Ben Price, CELDF Education Director

BenPrice@CELDF.org, 717-254-3233

As the Federal government dismantles environmental protections, state efforts to recognize the rights of nature have their day at the United Nations 

ALBANY, NY — About half of all waters in the United States are too polluted for swimming, fishing, or drinking. 

That, according to advocates, is why we need the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, a new law which was introduced into the New York legislature by Assemblyman Patrick Burke (District 142) on March 19th.

The bill, AO5156A, if passed, would be the first ever state-level “rights of nature” law in the United States. It would recognize “unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate and be restored” for the Great Lakes and other watersheds and ecosystems throughout the state.

Under the current system of law in almost every country, nature is considered to be property. Thus, those who “own” wetlands, forestland, and other ecosystems and natural communities, are largely permitted to use them however they wish, even if that includes destroying or polluting them..

According to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which kickstarted the rights of nature movement in the United States, rights of nature means recognizing that ecosystems and natural communities are not merely property that can be owned. Rather, they are entities that have an inherent and inalienable right to exist and flourish.

“We must be bold”

Today, April 22nd (Earth Day), advocates for the New York bill have been invited to the United Nations to address a high-level meeting on harmony with nature. Alongside New York State Assemblyman Patrick Burke, who introduced the bill last month, and other rights of nature supporters and advocates such as Movement Rights, Ben Price, Education Director for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), which drafted the bill, has also been invited to speak. The invitation was extended by the Plurinational State of Bolivia, which includes some protections for nature in its national constitution.

Besides playing a key role in drafting the New York bill, Price was instrumental to a 2006 rights of nature law passed in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, which was the first time rights of nature were recognized in any western legal system.  “Tamaqua didn’t even get statewide media attention, let alone national or international press,” Price says. “Yet it lit a fire and helped to inform Ecuador’s constitutional amendment of the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth).”

Since 2006, more than 400 rights of nature initiatives have been introduced around the globe, with Latin America accounting for more than any other region.

Here in the United States, rights of nature has been an uphill battle, as courts have ruled previous laws illegal and even pursued financial penalties against communities and lawyers for pursuing it. According to CELDF Executive Director Kai Huschke, the political moment we find ourselves in calls for a willingness to be bold and challenge systems of law and power that aren’t working.

“Rights of nature would not be where it is today had people and communities followed unjust rules,” Huschke says. “We’ve made progress because of people taking risks, being disobedient, and taking action. That’s what we’re trying to facilitate with our current rights of nature work.”

“Making sure future generations inherit more than just our mistakes”

It’s hard to swim against the current inside institutions — like government — that reward sticking with the status quo. 

But Assemblyman Patrick Burke, who represents South Buffalo, the City of Lackawanna, and the towns of West Seneca, Ellicott, and Orchard Park, is willing to push these boundaries — especially given the dire state of our waterways.

“When I passed one of the nation’s first microplastic bans as an Erie County legislator, it was because our communities demanded more than environmental regulation, they demanded accountability,” Burke says. “I carry that same responsibility into my role as Chair of the Great Lakes Taskforce [in the New York State Assembly]. The Great Lakes & State Waters Bill of Rights is about restoring balance between people and the ecosystems we depend on, making sure future generations inherit more than just our mistakes.”

Communities lift their voices in support of rights of nature

Across the region, support is growing for the New York bill.

“It’s a paradigm shift,” says Paul Winnie, a member of Tonawanda Seneca Nation who has been active in issues relating to tribal sovereignty, food, and environmental protection for many years. Winnie says that the bill represents an attempt to create a different way of relating to the natural world beyond extraction and exploitation. It’s something “that could combat the existing system to balance out corporate rights,” he says. “It’s trying to reignite that connection to nature.”

Anna Castonguay, Chair of the Western New York Environmental Alliance, also says that this bill would help bring some balance.

“We give legal personhood to corporations,” Castonguay says, “but have limited protections for the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land where we grow our food and live our lives on. The Great Lakes Bill of Rights would make it so that the health and vitality of the Earth and our communities is not an afterthought.”

“Allowing communities to keep polluters out”

Dr. Kirk Scirto, a primary care physician and public health specialist based in Buffalo, says that the bill is really about self-protection.

“Since we depend entirely on Nature for our survival, by destroying it throughout New York, we’re actually hurting ourselves,” Dr. Scirto says. “Striking at Nature is self-injury. This bill would allow communities to protect their rivers, creeks, lakes, and other ecosystems. It would allow each community to protect its water in its own way, without being overridden by state and federal government. Whether it’s a chemical company or a loud crypto mining center, it could allow communities to keep these polluters out if they choose. And it could be used to make corporations restore waters they’ve already polluted! So, it expands both community rights and Nature’s.”

Talking Rivers, an organization based in the St. Lawrence River / Kaniatarowanénhne and Adirondack Watersheds, wrote a memorandum of support for the bill, stating:

“At this critical juncture as it becomes apparent that the federal government is going to scale back, if not outright abandon, efforts to protect our environment, in particular our waters, it is vitally important that state and local governments step up in a major way. The Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights is that major step forward.”

Pope Francis: “Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves”

Carol De Angelo, the Director of the Office of Peace, Justice and Integrity of Creation at the Sisters of Charity New York, a Catholic religious organization, is another supporter of the bill.

“I am grateful that Representative Burke has introduced this bill,” De Angelo says. “Over the years as a Sister of Charity of New York and a longtime member of ROAR (Religious Organizations Along the River), my awareness and advocacy of the Hudson River and all God’s Creation have strengthened as I become more aware of the interconnectedness of all life.”

De Angelo’s belief in the importance of protecting the environment was reinforced by the late Pope Francis, who was the first Pope to address rights of nature and who passed away on April 20th.

“The 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ confirmed my belief and commitment,” De Angelo says. “In Laudato Si’ #139, Pope Francis says, ‘When we speak of the environment, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.’ This Bill, in recognizing the rights of nature, calls us to accountability and responsibility in creating a flourishing Earth Community for today’s children and future generations.”

Rights of Manoomin (Wild Rice) in Minnesota

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, an effort to protect a sacred and ecologically important plant — manoomin, more commonly known as wild rice — using a rights-based approach is underway.  The Wild Rice Act was introduced by Senator Mary Kunesh, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state senate, in February.

Leanna Goose, an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe and co-author of the bill, says it is an attempt to recognize the inherent rights of non-human life forms.

“The issue at the core of the bill is the need to recognize and honor the living beings we share this Earth with,” Goose says. “They have an inherent right — separate from any right ‘assigned’ by humans — to exist and thrive, just as we do. In Anishinaabe culture, we understand that without all living beings we will cease to exist; our survival would not be possible. We show respect to our plant and animal kin, along with gratitude for this. This is what it means to recognize the inherent right of a living being. It is an invitation into a generational relationship of mutuality and whether we acknowledge it or not, that right exists. Recognizing it is a powerful first step toward fostering a deep respect for the Earth and all the living beings that call it home.”

Next Steps

The New York bill, like the Wild Rice Act in Minnesota, faces serious challenges going forward. In other rights of nature campaigns, even laws that have passed have faced legal challenges arguing they are unconstitutional. Ben Price, who says he was invited to the United Nations after Bolivian officials saw the New York bill and recognized it as a counterweight to anti-environmental federal policies, says that these efforts are all part of a larger process of culture change.

“Good things come in small packages,” he says. “Like Tamaqua, the likelihood of this bill having national or global effect may not be obvious. But given the current political atmosphere, people are looking for answers. Climate funding has been canceled. References to environmental harm removed from government websites. Under these circumstances, people rising up and passing laws like this at the local and state level is essential. These efforts are a voice in the wilderness and a bright spot amidst the chaos.”

How to support

With growing threats to water nationwide — including rapid growth in data centers, power plants, nuclear energy, industrial agriculture, and beyond — communities are looking for ways to protect the rivers, lakes, streams, and aquifers. 

Tish O’Dell, one of the CELDF organizers behind this bill, encourages people to reach out to her. She says that with the growing media coverage of this effort, people in several states have already expressed interest in bringing rights of nature to their areas. O’Dell also said that individuals, organizations, and businesses can sign on to a list of supporters to make their voice heard and start making connections to form coalitions.

Huschke, the CELDF Executive Director, also reminds supporters that they can donate to support the organization’s rights of nature work, including in New York.

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The Great Salt Lake. Image by Erin Testone.

A growing number of American jurisdictions are outlawing Right of Nature as we embark on the greatest rates of extinctions in our planetary history.  In this essay, Will Falk, encourages Rights of Nature advocates to recognize that we cannot wait for courts and governments to enforce Rights of Nature; we have to learn to enforce Rights of Nature ourselves.

Click here to read the full essay, published by Counter Punch.

Press release · 11th Local Rights of Nature Tribunal
Biobío, Concepción, Chile

International Rights of Nature Tribunal rules impacts caused by current forestry model as ecocide

The International Rights of Nature Tribunal held its 11th Local Tribunal in the Biobío region in Chile on Friday, January 12, focusing its attention on the violations of the Rights of Nature arising from the forestry model and the devastating forest fires of 2023.

Chaired by prominent environmental lawyer Enrique Viale and with the support of Earth Prosecutor Ricardo Frez, the Tribunal set out to investigate the responsibilities of public and private entities in implementing a destructive forestry model. The Tribunal had a panel of distinguished judges: Claudio Donoso (Chile), Antonio Elizalde (Chile), Jacqueline Arriagada (Chile), Lucio Cuenca (Chile), and Karina Riquelme (Chile).

On Thursday 11, the Tribunal was able to hold an in situ visit to the territory and toured Agua Amarilla, Coroney, Cerro Neuque, Bosque de Queules, in the commune of Tomé; and Patagual, Quetra, la Quebrada and the commune of Santa Juana, to talk with affected people, communities and neighborhood councils, learning about the monoculture tree plantations and seeing first-hand the impacts of the forestry model and the fires on the lives of people and Nature. They also visited a Queule reserve, where they could appreciate the resilience of this and other native trees such as the Quillay, which resisted the fire, as well as examples of sustainable forest management that protects small refuges of life.

During the session, the judges had the opportunity to hear moving testimonies and compelling evidence from experts, affected communities, and activists, reflecting the catastrophic impact of the forestry model on communities and the ecosystem. It was highlighted that the mega-fires of 2023 burned through more than 479,000 hectares, severely affecting 61% of the forest area and 9.4% of the total area of the region. These fires had a significant human cost, with more than 7,000 people affected, 26 fatalities, and the loss of 33,000 domestic animals.

The technical voice of representatives and researchers from EULA, NGO Conciencia Sur, and Earth Law Center was heard. In addition, members of communities and local organizations from Tomé, Patagual, Nacimiento, San Ramón-Quillón, and Santa Juana gave their testimonies, and the day closed with representatives of the Pewenche Indigenous Community of Alto Biobío, who recounted the pain and despair they feel at seeing their ancestral lands devastated, and how water contamination, loss of biodiversity, and territorial displacement have significantly affected their life systems, culturally affecting their roots and spirituality. 

Experts in ecology and environmental sciences presented alarming data on the degradation of ecosystems due to forestry operations in the territory. They described evidence of the loss and contamination of water, affectation and critical loss of relevant species of flora and fauna, and, in general, the direct consequences of intensive forestry exploitation. At the same time, the imperative need to reevaluate the use of agrochemicals, deforestation, and monoculture practices was addressed.

After an exhaustive analysis, the judges issued strong statements. Forestry companies such as Arauco and CMPC, Chile’s largest, were singled out as responsible for such environmental destruction, and for compromising the fundamental rights of local communities. The Secretariat of the Tribunal invited the following institutions and companies to make an appearance before the Tribunal: CORMA, CONAF, ARAUCO (owner of the M.A.P.A. project), and CMPC (owner of the Santa Fe Plant project), who did not attend the hearing. An important presentation was made by the Mayoress of Santa Juana, who spoke of the suffering of the inhabitants of her commune, the history of the installation of the Forestry model, and the complete abandonment of the central government to mitigate and prevent these disasters.

In addition, an urgent call was made to reform insufficient environmental legislation and establish policies prioritizing environmental and community justice, urging the Chilean authorities to recognize the intrinsic rights of Nature as set out in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. 

The historical consequences of the implementation of Decree-Law No. 701 were denounced and a proposal was made to modify Article 19 of Law No. 20,283, on “Native Forest Recovery and Forestry Promotion”, and that community science should contribute to understanding and protecting the affected territories and, in this way, promoting a system of restoration that respects local ecosystems.

Claudio Donoso, one of the Tribunal’s judges, said: “The intervention of the mountains and mountain ranges has seriously affected the water supply, creating an alarming shortage. We are observing an accelerated deterioration of the territory which, in turn, is causing serious impacts on local communities”.

Lucio Cuenca, for his part, denounced the influence of large forestry companies on politics and institutions, alleging that “there is a kind of capture by groups such as Arauco and CMPC, which have molded politics according to their interests”.

The Tribunal stressed the urgent need to rethink forestry policies in Chile, highlighting the demands of Indigenous and local communities who have directly suffered the devastating consequences of this model. Karina Riquelme, another critical voice of the Tribunal, said: “The communities have made complaints that have been ignored for years. It is time to act and deeply recognize their pain, which we have seen has had vital consequences”.

The judges of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal issued an oral verdict on Friday afternoon, January 12, in which they declared:

  1. That the current Chilean forestry model has provoked ecocide in the territory and against all living beings that inhabit it, human and non-human;
  2. That the forestry model violates the Rights of Nature and even the weak environmental protection regulations existing in the country;
  3.  It has verified the absence of the Chilean State in the regulation and control of the existing regulations, which they also declared to be completely insufficient;
  4. That the actions of the large forestry companies violate the Rights of Nature;
  5. The State of Chile is urged to recognize the Rights of Nature in its internal regulations, as the only way for the survival of humanity and biodiversity, and to promote a plan to overcome the current forestry model;
  6. A plan of restoration and integral regeneration is urgently demanded, worked on with the communities and in the local territory;
  7. The declaration of a moratorium or prohibition of the establishment of invasive and pyrophyte species in the territory is demanded;
  8. It considers Queule, the Nahuelbuta mountain range, the Cayumanqui hill, and the Biobío river, among other elements of Nature, as subjects of inherent rights that are recognized and protected by the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which must be recognized, guaranteed and respected by the State of Chile.

The initiative of the XI Local Tribunal in the Biobío case against the Forestry Model was organized by the International Rights of Nature Tribunal and convened at the local level by the Alliance for the Rights of Nature of Biobío, composed of various organizations, including Red por la Superación del Modelo Forestal, Entramas por el Biobío, NGO We Kimün and NGO Defensa Ambiental; and, at the international level, by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN).

 View the original source here.

That Begins with the Stories we Tell . . .

CELDF’s Education Director, Ben G. Price, is a pioneer in establishing the legal Rights of Nature. He organized the first community on Earth to enact a Rights of Nature law (Tamaqua, PA, 2006). In 2019 he shared what he had learned from nearly two decades of community organizing and research in his book “How Wealth Rules the World: Saving Our Communities and Freedoms from the Dictatorship of Property.” Now he has written a fantasy adventure novel that reveals the magic that lives within the natural world but that industrializing societies have aggressively turned against. 

A Coming of Age Story of Love, Loss and Nature: Ogden by DGR News Service | Sep 25, 2023| gave this review:

It is rare to read something written from a nonhuman perspective without forcing humanlike qualities on them. Ben Price does exactly that in ‘Ogden: A Tale for the End of Time.’”

Storyteller, Ecologist and Author Andreas Kornevall describes the story this way: 

Ogden: A Tale for the End of Time takes us back to the moment when we had a choice between the cunning allure of today’s socially constructed virtual reality and the real magic of living in the natural world as participants, not just distant observers. The story connects us to an organic intelligence, where nature is infused with mysteries that transcend the human.” 

Can humanity survive when Nature is the judge?

Jennifer Murnan wrote:

“Within a bro-scape of pervasive male and human supremacy with all its attendant ills, the author of Ogden also weaves in love of life and living beyond the confinement of the onset of industrial civilization. Words cannot conceal what this tale of Trolls and men seeks to reveal, the beauty of nature and our severance from her.  The crescendo of this provocative tale is like no other I have ever encountered in the fantasy genre; it is a damning indictment of the source of Earth’s seventh mass extinction.  Perhaps it is only in fantasy, in dreams, that we can discover truth and our destiny as civilized humans? This is a raw, a revelatory and yes, a recommended read.”

Tom Mullian, Editor, La Mott Times says:

“’Ogden’ is fantasy of the highest order. In the lost and adopted character of the Troll baby Ogden, we witness his growth and maturation in the context of his loving human family. From the trial and error of innocence, we follow his rapid and sometimes humorous journey to maturation. He fulfils his ancient identity as a descendent of a very real and magical lineage, magic often being that which was once innate to the experience but is now relegated to dusty, brittle manuscripts. Ogden will leave you in wonder, wistful for more and an unwavering insight that Nature is sentient.” 

Ogden: A Tale for the End of Time

Ben G. Price

Addison & Highsmith Publishers (October 24, 2023)

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1592113132

Unmuting Rights of Nature

Ohio’s CELDF aims to restore Rights of Nature after lawmakers’ pushback

Enjoy this WT Media Group interview with Tish O’Dell, Consulting Director CELDF. The interview explores what the Rights of Nature movement is about, pushbacks from governmental agencies that are ostensibly supposed to protect people and places, along with what’s next for CELDF’s involvement with the movement.

Read the interview here.

Feature photo by Mayur Gala

Law is Unnatural

Without turning our hearts away from the idea of legal rights for what is called “Nature,” and without abandoning the motivating spirit that instigated this movement, we must go further and enter into right-relationship with Nature, the ground of our being.

The legal idea animating the call for universal adoption of enforceable non-human Rights of Nature can be a bridge between where we have been as a culture and where we must go as a species. It may serve as a Petri dish in which proponents experiment with new human legal relationships to the natural world. But law’s dominant purpose has historically been to protect status quo power arrangements, not to advance and institutionalize legal rights, unless they are rights attached to property, wealth, and their accumulation.

We are right to advocate for and institute legal rights for the natural world. But, true to form, the tendency of law will be to adapt itself to superficialities, including the language of Nature’s rights. The probable effect will be not a true shift of behavior but that of a brand, a meme to promote a pretended transition from the society of extraction and consumption into a society of extraction and consumption that has shed its sense of guilt.

Photo by Markus Spiske

To land here as a destination vs. a waypoint is hardly the shift of our culture’s worldview required if our true goal is to instill the change of heart that can put a stop to our collective massacre of life on Earth. All such schemes promise to further debase the community of life, including human communities. Wouldn’t you say?

Natural Gaslighting

By grudgingly pretending to care about the natural world while continuing to prey upon it, all the while resolving to attach a market value to life in all its manifestations, plutocrats and consumers perform a shallow public ritual We’re getting and giving all the lip service we could ever hope for. What’s really needed is a new sacred bond, some honor-bound oath and commitment beyond the coercive power of law. We can not continue pretending to sustainably sacrifice life on Earth, one habitat, one species at a time, to wealth and greed and consumerism. It seems like we should know that in our hearts and not need the prospect of legal jeopardy to make us stop participating in gruesome ecocide.

Plutocrats are feverishly inventing market and property-based environmental-sounding subterfuges that amount to no more than gaslighting.

Natural Asset Companies (NACs) apply monetary value to parts and functions of Nature ostensibly beneficial to humans; corporate boards appoint humans as unelected representatives of Nature, as though they can unilaterally establish an Earth-friendly republic, by letting corporate governance continue to operate at the helm.

Origin of photo unknown

The cooptation of rights of nature language in perfunctory laws and corporate policies that subordinate the intended Rights of Nature cultural shift to market priorities, and the valorization (assigning monetary value) of amputated aspects of creation: these are not improvements on the regulation of the rate of pragmatic destruction instituted over fifty years ago by legislation like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. We’ve seen how those gaslit minimalist protections of Nature’s value to humans unfolded into the environmental disasters now confronting us on a global scale. 

Status quo betrayal of the transformative spirit that originally animated the Rights of Nature Movement is at hand. We should have expected it, but we shouldn’t tolerate it. We can’t end our complicity if we let the captains of capital bait and switch their way out of the called-for emancipation of Nature, so that we can continue to work their jobs and consume what they’ve extracted from us and the natural world. That would expose our complicity as a voluntary choice we are making. Wouldn’t you say?

Transitioning Away from Extractive Thinking

Words matter. They are the raw material of our thoughts. They extract and distill meaning. They shape our attitudes about the world and animate our behavior toward it, and the quality of our relationships with it, and with others.

Photo by Brett Jordan

“Rights OF Nature” is an example of how words can misguide our thinking and behavior toward the world we live in. “Rights of nature” is a framing with roots in the soil of law and governance; the very law, as John Locke declared, that “has no other end but the preservation of property.”

Our manner of expression betrays reluctance to abandon the mindset of extraction, in this case of some quality called rights from the abstraction of the real world that we call Nature. Are rights some quality, something of value to be mined and protected like precious gems, where law does the prospecting and lawyers haggle over which qualities must be protected and which can be extracted from the raw ore of the natural world?

I am trying to point out a habit of thought in which, despite our intention to protect the natural world, we continue to conceive of nature as a thing, separate and different in kind from our own essence. We name it “nature” like we name everything of use to us in the world. How can we live in harmony with Nature, which all humanity is part of, when the very words we use, as we attempt to return ourselves to our natural relationship with the world, hold the natural world at arms-length as a “thing’ in our thoughts?

Perhaps it’s difficult, after a few centuries of erecting factories and machines and ever-more synthetic environments for us to live in, to viscerally feel ourselves as part of Nature. We are used to extracting not only metallic ores and fossil fuels, but ourselves and our communities from the natural world, and yet we don’t notice the increasing distance placed between us and our natural habitat by the human-made environment. Even in defense of Nature, because our thinking has not changed from that of extractors and consumers, we can’t quite get it right. 

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel

According to Grist, “In June, state security forces in the United Republic of Tanzania engaged in a violent eviction campaign against Indigenous Maasai, shooting them and driving them from their lands . . . The violence was the Tanzanian government’s latest move in a years-long campaign to remove the Maasai and make way for game reserves, protected areas, and tourism.”

People ARE Nature, as surely as the flora and fauna that surround them. Our Indigenous relatives, like our animal and plant relatives, have not utterly forgotten their connection to reality.  But we moderns have. That’s our original sin and the cause of our self-eviction from the garden of life.

Our sterile, modern mindset has roots in the process of intellectual reductionism inherited from what’s been called the Enlightenment. Reductionism, dependent as it is on extraction and dissection of the world, is the brainchild of sixteenth-century luminary Francis Bacon. He purportedly summarized how he thought an enlightened humanity should treat Nature, using his new method of scientific reductionism, this way: 

My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [Nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets. I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave … the mechanical inventions of recent years do not merely exert a gentle guidance over Nature’s courses, they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.” 

Because we too are part of Nature, we will not escape suffering the turmoil and convulsions that the delusion of human exceptionalism has brought upon the community of life on Earth.The poisoned air and water, the rising seas and changing climate, the eternal silencing of millions of species: these are the inheritance of our arrogant rationalizations. 

At first, we may require coercive laws to restrain the repetitive rape of Nature for liability-free profit, and to put a stop to our consumerist complicity in these obscenities. But safeguarding the natural world with the shield of law alone won’t be enough. We must internalize how important it is for us to live in right-relationship with the world from which we arose and upon which we depend for our every breath. It’s a matter of life and death. Wouldn’t you say?

Kai Huschke, senior staff at CELDF, a lecturer for CELDF’s Democracy School, and a board member of the Oregon Community Rights Network and Washington Community Rights Network will be a participating panelist in a discussion about rights for Nature.

The discussion will explore the Rights of Nature and why this legal framework and cultural way of framing the world is the next horizon of protecting the natural places we care about. This in-person event is FREE and open to the public at the Moot Court Room, GU Law School, located at 721 North Cincinnati St, Spokane, WA 99202.

READ MORE

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March 3rd at 1:15pm to 2:45pm PST/4:15pm to 5:45pm EST

CELDF’s Kai Huschke will be facilitating this panel on “Protecting our Vital Watersheds – Transitioning to Rights of Nature” focused on giving entities in nature such as rivers and watersheds legal rights. Rights of Nature is increasingly being advanced throughout the world. Join us in exploring Indigenous perspectives on watersheds, the importance of recognizing their ecological complexities, and the importance of protecting them with Rights of Nature Law.

This year’s PIELC theme is “Reconnecting and Transitioning Together” and will take place from Thursday, March 2, 2023, to Sunday, March 5, 2023. Please keep an eye out for any updates at PIELC.

REGISTER HERE.

Article by Katie Surma. Feature image by Paul Horn / Inside Climate News

SIENA, Italy—The rights of nature movement has celebrated its first European victory as Spain enshrined into national law the rights of the Mar Menor lagoon to exist and be protected and preserved. 

Mar Menor, Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon, has suffered from massive die-offs of aquatic life in recent years brought on by pollution from agriculture, sewage and other development. 

In 2020, Eduardo Salazar, a Spanish environmental lawyer, and Teresa Vicente Gimenez, a professor of philosophy of law at Murcia University, began a quest for legislative recognition of Mar Menor’s rights, the highest form of protection under the law, with a “popular legislative initiative,” a participatory democratic mechanism in Spain’s constitution. Salazar called the existing conventional environmental laws intended to protect the lake “useless.”

Read the original article here.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) gathered in Siena Italy at the 13th century monastery, Certosa di Pontignano, from October 15-18, and CELDF was there. CELDF’s Ben Price shared organizing experiences with representatives from Indigenous communities, as well as delegates from Ecuador, Germany, the Philippines, South Africa, Columbia, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada, Brazil, Spain, and other nations.

The overarching purpose of the gathering was to solidify organizational structures and tools for advancing the Rights of Nature globally, and to review and enact an organizational constitution. GARN is neither NGO nor a non-profit organization, but an alliance of many who are working to elevate the legal status of Nature from that of mere property to an entity with fundamental rights. 

A Declaration drafted and adopted by participants can be read here: The Seed of Siena Declaration from the GARN Rights of Nature Global Gathering – Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN)

Feature image by Walter Martin

The law locks up the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But leaves the greater villain loose

Who steals the common from off the goose

from a 17th Century English Protest Song against the Enclosures

Eviction from Eden

The separation of human communities from their land base is a violent tactic used by ambitious tyrants. Prior to the transatlantic expansion of empire in the sixteenth century, monarchs in Europe, and particularly in England, practiced their techniques of domination on their domestic population by evicting people from their traditional common lands and instituted a protracted and continuing legal assault on human communities in a centuries-long campaign known historically as the enclosure of the commons

Today, we call the appropriation of publicly shared land for exclusive private use “privatization.” Legally recognized land proprietorship conveys monopoly control of land parcels to a small number of favored people, meaning that in the view of the law they possess the right to exclude all others from use of land once owned by no one, but shared in common by communities. 

Establishing exclusionary control of land by a privileged elite is the first ploy and the perennial strategy of those intent on empire. It entails severing the natural connection between human communities and the natural communities (now called ecosystems) in which they normally share membership.

The eviction of peasants from the land was intended to vindicate the empire’s claim to possess all natural “resources” so that, through widespread deprivation, the bounty of the land could be transformed into commodities and the dispossessed could be motivated by the resulting scarcity to buy them back with their labor, thus fueling the engine of empire. 

Land enclosures and centralized control of domestic, settler, and Indigenous populations are defining characteristics of coercive civilizations. The cynical rationalization for all of it was accomplished early on through a kind of propaganda that is praised to this day as the epitome of human intellectual achievement. It’s referred to as “enlightenment philosophy.” Central to this alleged enlightened way of thinking is the claim that civilized humans are superior to and set apart from Nature and every form of life that comprises it. This belief system has justified the savage conquest of people ironically referred to as savages. It has excused the ruination of communities and the rapacious and wasteful extraction of Earth’s bounty for short-term convenience and luxury, without a thought for the future. If this origin story seems unfamiliar, perhaps it has for too long been kept secret. And if that’s the case, then it’s long past time for us to come to terms with it. Wouldn’t you say?

Legalizing Nature

The movement for the Rights of Nature strives to correct the aberration of human thought that allows us to forget our natural place in the world and how it was taken from us. It holds the promise that we can reverse the catastrophic trajectory of civilizations’ continued ravaging of the natural world toward extinction. To do so, the movement’s first gambit has been to employ the most effective weapon devised by civilization to intentionally coerce change in human behavior: Law.  

Photo by Joel Holland

By positing legal rights for Nature, the Rights of Nature Movement challenges empire at its most assailable point. Because law is promoted as a rational tool for advancing the best interests of society, confronting its current contradictions and proposing law that would actually achieve its espoused purpose can be an effective counter-weight to the grim reality imposed on a devastated world by coercive and imprudent laws that favor a privileged few. It began in 2006 in a small Pennsylvania town, Tamaqua, that enacted a law recognizing legal rights for its local ecosystem. Since then it’s spread to Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, India, and far-flung points on the globe. Increasingly, law is being used to stop the murder of Nature. It’s a decent start. Wouldn’t you say?

The Future with a Future

The Rights of Nature Movement aspires to accomplish three important things simultaneously:

  1. Recognize that the living world cannot legitimately be treated as rightless property so that Nature is finally emancipated from human bondage.
  2. Reunite human communities, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, as constituent members of the natural world, fully able to speak for and enforce protections of the local ecosystems in which they reside, setting them at-liberty to justly govern their own affairs and care for the future of their Nature-integrated communities.
  3. Protect Nature from the human inclination to play the role of parasite and encourage instead a symbiotic human relationship with the living world.

In keeping with the example of Indigenous people’s moral traditions, the Rights of Nature Movement aspires to move beyond legal enforcement of rights for Nature’s constituent ecosystems and toward cultural internalization of humanity’s obligation to respect and revere Earth’s biosphere as the source and sustainer of all life, including our own. That seems like what a responsible society would want to do. Wouldn’t you say?

CELDF’s Proposed Rights of Nature Principles

Feature illustration by Talking Wings

In Commemoration of the September 2006 enactment of the first Rights of Nature legislation in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, and the September 2008 enactment of the first constitutional recognition of the Rights of Pachamama in Ecuador, we are pleased to offer this updated and expanded proposal for the Legal Rights of Nature Principles.

These proposed legal principles are just that – proposals. Though we view these principles as important guides for how policy is developed, they are open to further refinement. We humbly invite members of Indigenous communities to review these principles. We acknowledge that developing these principles to guide future legislation is an ongoing project, to be informed by maturing understanding, real-world experiences, and regularly refined to address changing circumstances. 

We also call upon our non-Indigenous allies across the globe, those who have engaged in the Rights of Nature Movement with integrity, to offer their input, critique, suggestions, and assistance in establishing, disseminating, and promoting these principles as a living evolving document. These principles are meant to help guide not just CELDF’s work, but all legal Rights of Nature work.

We anticipate a time for bringing allies together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, representing our various communities and organizations, to arrive at a common understanding and agreement on the fundamental values that must be integral to the making of legitimate Rights of Nature law.

LEGAL RIGHTS OF NATURE PRINCIPLES

Proposed by Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund

September 2022

Illustration by Blake Lavia

CELDF has been involved in establishing legal Rights for Nature in Western law since 2006, from the beginning of this movement’s contemporary phase. We recognize that institutionalizing the Rights of Nature requires a cultural paradigm shift that challenges and changes legal systems, as well as social, and moral behavior. For life on Earth to survive, and for humanity to persist as one of millions of living species, people and their governments must make a profound commitment, and that means acting earnestly, honestly, swiftly, and with integrity, not merely agreeing in principle with the need for transformation.

New laws must represent the values, morals, and needs that will shape culture and support and sustain a thriving and diverse Earth community. Giving preference to human convenience and luxury over the survival of non-human species has never been a viable strategy for a healthy future–in fact, such an orientation has undermined the survivability of the human species. The economic system that has been built on that human-centric value system now threatens to eradicate a significant part of the planet’s biosphere, while further enslaving the greater part of humanity in service to the privileges of the merest minority.

The necessary paradigm shift is attainable. By following the lead of Indigenous cultures and local community knowledge, we must reestablish humans as a part of Nature and not apart from it. This will automatically yield positive results for the majority of people and all of the living planet.

We have already seen cases of opportunistic co-optation of the term “Rights of Nature” that, if allowed to stand unchallenged, will work to dilute, neutralize, and defeat this movement. Therefore, we offer this statement of principles that we think are indispensable to Rights of Nature legislation, without which, we believe, the goals of the Rights of Nature movement will remain aspirational at best and become co-opted and subservient to the same agenda immanentizing Nature’s destruction. 

Institutionalizing the legally enforceable Rights of Nature requires all of us to acknowledge our obligation to maintain inviolate certain basic rights inherent within and for the exclusive benefit of the natural world, unmediated by human convenience or preference. In its recent Los Cedros Forest decision, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court put it this way: “This is not a rhetorical lyricism, but rather a transcendent statement and a historical commitment that demands ‘a new form of civic coexistence, in diversity and harmony with nature.’”

Rights of Nature recognizes and honors that Nature has inalienable rights and is not property to be owned and exploited. Nature includes all ecosystems and living beings including watersheds, rivers, seas, mountains, flora and forests, animals, ecosystems, as well as humans, and all inorganic habitats in which organic beings dwell. These legal rights are a prudent and necessary recognition that humans are only one species on Earth and that respecting the Rights of Nature may restore the balance and interconnected health of Earth.

A new system of law based on respect for Nature and the obligations we share as collaborators with life-supporting ecosystems must be institutionalized, recognizing Nature as a unique legal entity and rights holder. We call upon communities, peoples, organizations, and governments to enact, implement, enforce, and to harmonize with Rights of Nature policies and laws that meet these minimum criteria, gleaned from the original New Orleans Statement of the Rights of Nature Symposium of October 28, 2017, from language adopted into law by CELDF partner communities, from the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court’s ruling in the Los Cedros Protected Forest case on November 10, 2021, and from the Ponca Tribal Law of Nature.

Accordingly, to be considered legitimate law instituting, protecting, and enforcing the legal Rights of Nature, our view is that each local, provincial, state, national, and international law purporting to advance the Rights of Nature must:

  1. Recognize the inherent, inalienable legal Rights of Nature and its constituent ecosystems, habitats, and natural communities to exist, flourish, self-organize, evolve, and regenerate, and to restoration, recovery, and preservation when harmed, interpreting these rights in the manner most favorable to the protection of Nature and constituent ecosystems.
  2. Define Nature and ecosystems so as to convey “a naturally occurring structural, functional and organizational unit, consisting of a community of organisms and the biotic and abiotic environmental variables that live and interact as a symbiotic whole in a given environment,or stated differently, “Nature is a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all other beings. The term “being” includes ecosystems, natural communities, species and all other natural entities which exist as part of Nature.” (Article 1, Section 1 of the Ponca Tribal Law of Nature)
  3. Apply the Rights of Nature and Ecosystems such that “All beings are entitled to all the inherent rights recognized in this law without distinction of any kind, such as may be made between organic and inorganic beings, species, origin, use to human beings, or any other status; all beings have rights which are specific to their species or kind and appropriate for their role and function within the communities within which they exist; and the rights of each being are limited by the rights of other beings and any conflict between their rights must be resolved in a way that respects Nature and each being within Nature.” (Article 1, Section 4 of the Ponca Tribal Law of Nature)
  4. Ensure that the Rights of Nature are free from violation, regulation, and subordination to other laws, legal and financial liabilities, economic priorities, commodification, monetization, or classification by legal concepts such as “juristic personhood” where financial liabilities or resource valuations are imposed.
  5. Emancipate Nature, ecosystems, and living beings from the legal status of “property,” which allows for the violation of Nature’s rights by giving deference to vested legal privileges.
  6. Recognize that Nature includes human beings, when they are present, as a constituency, and that the very existence of humanity is inevitably tied to that of Nature, and that the Rights of Nature necessarily encompass the right of humanity to its existence as a species, and the right of Indigenous people and permanent residents to dwell unmolested in their natural habitat.
  7. Guarantee the ecosystem has legal standing to appear as the real party of interest in administrative proceedings and legal actions affecting its rights.
  8. Authorize residents of communities to represent the ecosystem in which they physically dwell, and ensure that they do so in the name of that ecosystem, for the sole purpose of advancing its rights, recognizing that they are part of that ecosystem and have legal standing, in any and all legal proceedings, to do so.
  9. Require full, transparent, understandable, accurate, and timely consultation and the informed consent of the resident human community representing an ecosystem that may be affected regarding proposed industrial, extractive, development, political, and financial activities before any activity begins. 
  10. Apply the precautionary principle and restrictive measures, including locally promulgated prohibitions, for activities that may lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, or the permanent alteration of natural cycles whenever the majority of residents in a human community representing an ecosystem declares any action or omission may cause a violation of Nature’s rights to occur, even if there is no supporting scientific evidence. 
  11. Require that damages derived from administrative, legal, contractual, or other proceedings be used solely and exclusively to protect, repair, and restore Nature in the affected ecosystem to assist in bringing it to its prior natural state.

These proposed legal principles are open to further refinement. We recognize that the collective professional experience of CELDF garnered from advocating for and assisting communities to implement legal Rights of Nature protections, does not constitute the only and last word on these crucial issues. We humbly invite Indigenous input, informed by traditional wisdom, to review these principles and share those insights. Understanding that legal rights are rooted in the legacy of Western colonial empires, and aspiring finally to achieve a global culture having internalized the values of respect, reverence, and obligation toward the living Earth, we acknowledge that developing these principles to guide future legislation is an on-going project, to be informed by maturing understanding and regularly refined to address changing circumstances in light of that understanding. Our aim in presenting these proposed principles is to embark on a journey of needed healing so that together, the whole of humanity may return to right-relationship with the rest of the living world.

We also call upon our non-Indigenous allies across the globe, those who have engaged in the Rights of Nature Movement with integrity, to offer their input, critique, suggestions, and assistance in establishing, disseminating, and promoting these principles as a living document. We anticipate a time for bringing allies together, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, representing our various communities and organizations, to arrive at a common understanding and agreement on the fundamental values that must be integral to the making of legitimate Rights of Nature law.

Unveiling Rights of Nature Artwork and Logo

As the days get shorter and the cooler temperatures begin to set in, providing great relief for so many, including us humans, we at CELDF feel the time is right to pick up where we left off at the end of June with our Nature Leads Series.  In June, we celebrated and reviewed the very positive constitutional court decision in Ecuador, ruling in favor of the Los Cedros Cloud Forest over a mining project. If you missed it, the webinar recording and supporting documents can be found here.

Picking up where we left off, we want to begin this next chapter of the Nature Leads Series by unveiling our beautiful new Rights of Nature artwork and logo designed by two talented artists and organizers from the St. Lawrence River / Kaniatarowanenneh Watershed, Haudenosaunee Territory, in what is known as New York State.

When several of CELDF staff signed up for a Rights of Nature event they had organized in March of 2022, it seemed the universe had brought us together.

Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo together make up Talking Wings. Blake is a filmmaker, illustrator and author and Tzintzun is an environmental artist-scholar and story weaver, striving to plant the seeds of a regenerative future. This amazingly creative team was able to take CELDF’s verbal description of our Rights of Nature work and transform it into creative illustrations and logos to convey our message visually. Art has always played an important role in movements for systemic change.

Even though we are taught to believe that our laws and courts have the final say, we at CELDF have learned over the 20-plus years of working on advancing Rights of Nature laws that in the end, Nature will prevail. And so this illustration represents this belief that Nature is above human courts and systems of law. 

The “scales of justice” on the courtroom face are shown in balance, contrasting with the very unbalanced place in which it is currently stuck. The courtroom is depicted as gray, colorless and lifeless, but the colorful birds flying out of the courtroom doors and the vivid colors of nature atop the courthouse depict how life-giving change can happen if we continue to challenge and fight for Nature’s rights, which in the end are also our rights—as we are part of Nature.

We at CELDF are honored and inspired by Blake and Tzintzun’s talent and work advancing Rights of Nature in their own community along the St. Lawrence River.  And since the St. Lawrence is the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean from the Great Lakes, they are also following closely the Great Lakes Bill of Rights legislation introduced in the New York General Assembly this year.

It is our hope that their amazing artwork inspires you to continue to protect your community and the amazing ecosystems that you are interconnected with, and to remind you that CELDF is here to assist and support you moving forward. The Nature Leads Series will continue with more interesting and thought provoking documents, conversations and webinars over the next several months…. stay tuned.

May you also be moved by this inspirational poem by Tzintzun—-

The Ecosystem Without and Within By Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo, Talking Wings

We have forgotten,

the angles of words and stone

trapping our stories

within walls of faulty dreams.

Universes of living,

replaced with lists

of numbers and things.

We organize our possessions,

behind illusions of marble

 to ward off

the inevitable revelation,

the haunting totality,

the frightening reality:

That the “We” of our laws and statues,

our communal fantasy,

is nothing but a humanoid blasphemy.

From the temple of our superiority complex,

grows a world,

a world living inside and around us,

a world that envelops all of us,

crashing our dams,

our cities, our walls,

a tree breaking through the cracks

to breathe back in our relations.

It is time

To let the walls become rivers,

water flowing like roots,

writing a new current,

confluence,

tapestry.

Us and our words our straight lines,

are only one piece,

shard of a larger,

ever evolving, existing, regenerating, adapting

Ecosystem

(our collective conversation

and responsibility).

“Putting the rights of nature on the map. A quantitative analysis of rights of
nature initiatives across the world” was published online by Journal of Maps on
June 13, 2022, authored by Alex Putzer, Tineke Lambooy, Ronald Jeurissen &
Eunsu Kim. This is a unique addition to the scholarship on the burgeoning
Rights of Nature (RoN) movement, and a welcome one, offering graphic and
visual references to the geography of RoN. The authors acknowledge the
assistance of Prof. Craig Kauffman, author of “The Politics of Rights of
Nature, Maria Mercedes Sanchez from the United Nations Harmony with
Nature Programme, as well as members from the Community Environmental
Defense Fund (CELDF). The full paper can be found HERE.

The Rights of Nature (RoN) promote a new understanding of the human
environment, where natural entities are conceived as subjects with intrinsic
value independent of human interests. The implementation of this idea
gained momentum in the United States in 2006. One decade and a half later,
the idea has spread all over the world. Despite some efforts, a sophisticated
geographical inventory of the movement is missing. Building on Kauffman
(2020), we identified and analysed 409 initiatives in 39 countries, creating the
most comprehensive database of RoN initiatives to date. We developed a
taxonomy that may guide further research. We also present two detailed
maps which can help policymakers, legislators, judges, researchers, and the
public at large to evaluate and compare initiatives. The findings of this
investigation directly help the UN Harmony with Nature program and have
contributed to the launch of the Eco-Jurisprudence Monitor, an online
database of RoN initiatives.

Wednesday, July 20, 2022 at 6:30 PM Eastern Time

Sierra Club Niagara Group Environmental Series: Rights of Nature Legislation with Dr. Joe Stahlman, Tish O’Dell and Assemblyman Patrick Burke

Rights of nature legislation bring us back to the concept of being one with nature, a belief held by indigenous cultures throughout the world. The current laws treat nature as a “resource” to be owned, used, and degraded. Dealing with the legacy of the “resource” economy of the 20th Century – does anyone remember Love Canal or a burning Buffalo River – the Western New York region deserves to be on the forefront of a proactive approach to environmental protection.

Please join us for a presentation by Dr. Joe Stahlman, director of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, who will discuss native views that the natural world is sacred and we are one element of that world. He will be followed by Tish O’Dell, organizer with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund who will discuss their work on Rights of Nature laws, and Assemblyman Patrick Burke (D-142nd district) who will discuss the Great Lakes Bill of Rights legislation he introduced in the NYS Assembly.

The session will be recorded and will be shared with you after the event.  Feel free to share this within your circle of contacts.  Pre-registration is required. 

UPDATE: Watch the Sierra Club Niagara Group Environmental Series: Rights of Nature Legislation with Dr. Joe Stahlman, Tish O’Dell and Assemblyman Patrick Burke

New York State Assemblyman Patrick Burke, a 37-year-old Democrat from the Buffalo area, has introduced legislation “that will create a Great Lakes Bill of Rights with the goal of securing legal rights for the entire ecosystem and giving people and nature a role in the decision-making process regarding current and future projects that impact the ecosystem.” …

Read more here.