Search Results for: rights of nature
Williams County residents build on Ohio’s growing Rights of Nature and Community Rights movement.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Tish O’Dell, Ohio Community Organizer
CELDF.org
tish@celdf.org
440-552-6774
WILLIAMS COUNTY, OH: Today, members of Williams County Alliance turned in over 2,500 signatures at the Williams County Board of Elections to place a county charter on the November ballot. The initiative would establish a charter for Williams County that recognizes the right to local self-government and strengthens state protections for human and civil rights. The proposed charter also recognizes the rights of ecosystems, including legally enforceable rights for the Michindoh Aquifer. It would ban corporate activities that violate those rights.
Williams County community members’ organizing efforts represent the most recent expansion of a rights-based movement growing around the state, which includes Toledo’s adoption of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in February.
Williams County residents face a threat to the Michindoh Aquifer, the sole source of drinking water for the county. A private corporation, Artesian of Pioneer (AOP), is proposing to pump and sell water from the Michindoh Aquifer to communities located outside the aquifer boundaries. These communities already have multiple sources of water, including from Lake Erie.
“As soon as AOP’s plan to privatize and profit off the water became public, local residents were immediately opposed,” said Sherry Fleming, Organizer with Williams County Alliance. “We are facing a water crisis, but we must respond by uplifting democratic, human and ecosystem rights above the profit motif. We see water as a human right and part of an ecosystem—not a commodity to be sold for profit. In Williams County, we have no other economically feasible source of water, there is no recognition of our right of local control, and the state has failed to act.”
“Once a pipeline to extract and sell the water to entities outside the aquifer is built, there will be no turning back,” said community activist Lou Pendleton. “Rather than a business selling our drinking water for profit, we should conserve the aquifer for future generations.”
Of the 2,500+ signatures residents turned in, 1,363 must be valid in order to qualify for the November ballot.
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund assisted in drafting the Williams County Charter.
About CELDF — Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) is building a movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature to advance democratic, economic, social, and environmental rights – building upward from the grassroots to the state, federal, and international level.
A grassroots community group called Toledoans for Safe Water said it has secured more than enough signatures to get a proposal for defending Lake Erie from future pollution threats on the 2018 fall election ballot.
The initiative is called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. It is described by the group as a “first-in-the-nation ecosystem rights of nature initiative by the people” to declare in the Toledo City Charter that the Lake Erie watershed has legal rights to “exist and flourish.”
At a news conference in the lobby of One Government Center on Monday morning, Toledoans for Safe Water said it had collected 10,500 signatures, twice the number required to get the initiative on the Nov. 6 ballot.
A Lucas County Board of Elections official said that agency has 10 days to determine how many signatures are valid. Based on its findings, city councilmen will decide whether to place the initiative on the ballot, she said.
Toledoans for Safe Water said it is comprised of volunteers seeking innovative ways to protect Lake Erie. It said that passage of the initiative will give citizen groups legal standing to sue major polluters on behalf of Lake Erie, even if drinking water is cleaned up enough by the city to prevent harm to residents.
Lake Erie Bill of Rights organizer Markie Miller said signatories used “their right to self-governance to protect the resources we rely on and create the community we envision.”
“Four years ago, we lost access to our drinking water and had to face our vulnerability,” she said, adding that the high-profile 2014 Toledo water crisis “should have been a wake-up call to initiate policies that prevent pollution and harm.”
Instead, Ms. Miller said, past practices have been protected.
The largest source of western Lake Erie pollution is agricultural runoff from farms.
“We need policies that empower the people and take serious action to protect the lake,” she said.
Toledoans for Safe Water said the group’s ballot initiative was drafted for it by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, celdf.org, which has worked with communities in at least 10 states to enact what are known as “rights to nature” laws.
The national legal-defense fund, based in Mercersburg, Pa., also does work in Nepal, India, Cameroon, Colombia, Australia, and other countries.
On its website, it said it began as a traditional public interest law firm seeking to protect the environment from threats such as incinerators and waste dumps, but encountered barriers put in place by the government and big business, including rights being granted to corporations which it felt overrode community decision-making. It also said it has worked with nearly 200 communities on community rights laws pertaining to issues such as fracking, factory farming, water privatization, and sewage spreading on farmland.
Much like another local group, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, Toledoans for Safe Water was created in response to the region’s 2014 water crisis.
It had about 40 volunteers collecting signatures from registered Toledo voters the past two years, Ms. Miller said.
Those collecting signatures included Sara Jobin, former Toledo Symphony Orchestra resident conductor and former Toledo Opera associate conductor, as well as ACLE founder Mike Ferner and some members of his group. Mr. Ferner is a former Toledo city councilman and a two-time mayoral candidate. Several union members helped, too.
“It was really a wide breadth of people involve,” Ms. Miller said.
Contact Tom Henry at thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
Photo: Little Gull by Kevin Vance, Flickr Creative Commons.
A grassroots community group called Toledoans for Safe Water said it has secured more than enough signatures to get a proposal for defending Lake Erie from future pollution threats on the 2018 fall election ballot.
The initiative is called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. It is described by the group as a “first-in-the-nation ecosystem rights of nature initiative by the people” to declare in the Toledo City Charter that the Lake Erie watershed has legal rights to “exist and flourish.”
At a news conference in the lobby of One Government Center on Monday morning, Toledoans for Safe Water said it had collected 10,500 signatures, twice the number required to get the initiative on the Nov. 6 ballot.
A Lucas County Board of Elections official said that agency has 10 days to determine how many signatures are valid. Based on its findings, city councilmen will decide whether to place the initiative on the ballot, she said.
Toledoans for Safe Water said it is comprised of volunteers seeking innovative ways to protect Lake Erie. It said that passage of the initiative will give citizen groups legal standing to sue major polluters on behalf of Lake Erie, even if drinking water is cleaned up enough by the city to prevent harm to residents.
Lake Erie Bill of Rights organizer Markie Miller said signatories used “their right to self-governance to protect the resources we rely on and create the community we envision.”
“Four years ago, we lost access to our drinking water and had to face our vulnerability,” she said, adding that the high-profile 2014 Toledo water crisis “should have been a wake-up call to initiate policies that prevent pollution and harm.”
Instead, Ms. Miller said, past practices have been protected.
The largest source of western Lake Erie pollution is agricultural runoff from farms.
“We need policies that empower the people and take serious action to protect the lake,” she said.
Toledoans for Safe Water said the group’s ballot initiative was drafted for it by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, celdf.org, which has worked with communities in at least 10 states to enact what are known as “rights to nature” laws.
The national legal-defense fund, based in Mercersburg, Pa., also does work in Nepal, India, Cameroon, Colombia, Australia, and other countries.
On its website, it said it began as a traditional public interest law firm seeking to protect the environment from threats such as incinerators and waste dumps, but encountered barriers put in place by the government and big business, including rights being granted to corporations which it felt overrode community decision-making. It also said it has worked with nearly 200 communities on community rights laws pertaining to issues such as fracking, factory farming, water privatization, and sewage spreading on farmland.
Much like another local group, Advocates for a Clean Lake Erie, Toledoans for Safe Water was created in response to the region’s 2014 water crisis.
It had about 40 volunteers collecting signatures from registered Toledo voters the past two years, Ms. Miller said.
Those collecting signatures included Sara Jobin, former Toledo Symphony Orchestra resident conductor and former Toledo Opera associate conductor, as well as ACLE founder Mike Ferner and some members of his group. Mr. Ferner is a former Toledo city councilman and a two-time mayoral candidate. Several union members helped, too.
“It was really a wide breadth of people involve,” Ms. Miller said.
Contact Tom Henry at thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.
Photo: Little Gull by Kevin Vance, Flickr Creative Commons.
The Center for Humans & Nature explores and challenges ideas about who we are as humans and how we might better relate to each other and the whole community of life. They pose big-picture questions, and here they post essays responding to the question: “Does fracking violate human rights?”
This week is the international Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on the Human Rights Impact of Fracking. The PPT has collected people’s stories on the threat of fracking and climate change to human rights and the rights of nature. The stories here will be part of the evidence that is presented to the international panel of judges.
Does Fracking Violate Human Rights?
CELDF is presenting an amicus curiae brief arguing that fracking violates the rights of nature and the human right to a healthy environment at the PPT on Wednesday, May 16th, 4:45 p.m.
Wild weather is occurring all over the world and yet news reports seem to miss the obvious link between these extreme weather events and the ongoing effects of climate change. Joining us to discuss the limitations – and possibilities – of news coverage on climate change is Andrew Revkin. Andrew is the Dot Earth blogger for the New York Times and a senior fellow for environmental understanding at Pace University.
A new strategy is catching on that gives communities the right to kick corporations out of their communities, while granting ecosystems “rights”.
Then, a new book explores the why it is that one in three children is chronically ill. Host Daphne Wysham speaks to Alice Shabecoff about her book Poisoned for Profit. Alice is the former national director for the National Consumers League. Her co-author on “Poisoned for Profit” is Philip Shabecoff, a former environmental reporter for the New York Times and the founder of Greenwire.
Music for this edition of Earthbeat includes “Freakin’ Frackin’” by Op-Critical and “Modern Age” by Eric Hutchinson. Our theme music is “Baladi” by Tony Anka, Bellydance Superstars vol. 2.
Photo of the Brisbane flooding of 2011 – by Erik Veland. Used via a creative commons license.
Here’s Erik’s comment on the flooding: “While I am not directly affected by the flood myself, as a freelance designer most my clients have and I am left without work. If you want to license any of these photos commercially, please contact me. You are still free to use the photos for non-commercial purposes, but if you can, please consider making a PayPal donation to erikveland@gmail.com so I can continue to eat and pay my rent. In return, I contribute shelter and power to those in need around me. If you are affected by the floods and need space or power, please also contact me.”
If you’d like to hear this edition of Earthbeat – please send us an e-mail
Posted by Michael Collins on December 5th, 2010
CELDF note: Here’s a commentary from one of our Democracy School graduates. Maybe it’s time for you to host a School in your community…
A couple of years ago, my son Logan and I completed the Daniel Pennock Democracy School. The 2-day program is offered by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) in Chambersburg, PA. The notion that nature somehow has rights has captured my imagination since my involvement with the Interfaith Roundtable on Sustainability in 1998, discussed in an earlier post on this site. I have to say that the program had a profound impact on my thinking about the meaning of sustainability and I am grateful to Thomas Linzey, Ben Price, and the other staff members for a weekend of education about the roots of U.S. culture.
Among the many notions I took away from that class, the two that have stayed with me is that corporations once had to serve the public’s interest. If it failed to do that, its charter could be revoked. The other one is the idea that nature, in some way, has rights, that can codified, at least locally, and now I learn, throughout a country. According to CELDF, a few months ago, Ecuador in September considered a new constitution that provides to the country’s “tropical forests, islands, rivers, and air” similar rights to humans. Clearly we need to continue to think about how to do this, but my view is that what CELDF is doing may be some of the most important work on the planet today.
I thought of CELDF as I have read excerpts from Tom Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. I enjoy Friedman’s writings on a number of issues, and this book is no exception. But, I was hoping for something else, and I found it, but not until the very last page where he describes a eulogy delivered by Amory Lovins at Donella Meadow’s memorial service:
A biologist, perhaps E.O. Wilson, noted that bees, ants, and termites, through not very smart individually, display high intelligence collectively-and then he added, “People seem just the opposite.” Dana was no exception. She was one of those promising specimens that are turning up more and more often in the search for intelligent life on earth-one of those much higher primates whose love, logic, radical stubbornness, courage, and passion awaken the rest of us to our ability and our responsibility to save the world…She wrote three years ago, “By nature I’m an optimist; to me all glasses are half-full,” yet she didn’t shrink from reporting bad news, always blended with encouragement about how to do better. She treated the future as choice, not fate, and she defined with luminous clarity how to do (as one sometimes must) what is necessary. She shared Rene Dubos’s view that despair is a sin, so when asked if we have enough time to prevent catastrophe, she’d always say that we have exactly enough time-starting now. Two years ago, when emailing an unusually somber column about events that made her weep, she appended the following note as the counterpoint: “A CEO was having to babysit for his young daughter. He was trying to read the paper but was totally frustrated by the constant interruptions. When he came across a full page of the NASA photo of the Earth from space, he got a brilliant idea. He ripped it up into small pieces and told his child to try to put it back together. He then settled in for what he expected to be a good half-hour of peace and quiet. But only a few minutes had gone by before the child appeared at his side with a big grin on her face. “You’ve finished already?” he asked. “Yep,” she replied. “So how did you do it?” “Well, I saw there was a picture of a person on the other side, so when I put the person together, the Earth got put together too….”.
Friedman then says:
There is so much to admire in that eulogy: the conviction that the future is our choice, not our fate, that when you put people together you put the planet together, that there is nothing in the universe quite as powerful as six billion minds wrapping around one problem…
Great. I totally agree. But, at least for me, there is another message here. That literally behind a whole earth is a whole person, and I don’t believe we will ever be whole until we acknowledge our total physical and moral interdependence with nature and bring that awareness into every dimension of human endeavor, including governance, through the work of organizations like CELDF, and through economics, as we are trying to begin.
“Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights” introduced in New York State Assembly
BUFFALO – What if bodies of water were guaranteed the kinds of legal rights that would criminalize their destruction? What if communities had the authority to enact laws that prevented pollution, extraction, and waste-dumping?
This would be the case under a new bill introduced into the New York State Assembly by Patrick Burke on Friday. If it becomes law, New York Assembly Bill AO5156A, the Great Lakes and State Waters Bill of Rights, 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 New York State.
“All people deserve healthy ecosystems and clean water, and recognizing the inherent rights of nature to exist and flourish is the best way to protect this,” says Assemblyman Burke. “Protecting one watershed or regulating toxins one at a time isn’t enough. All New Yorkers are connected through our water, and so this bill protects all of us.”
Representative Burke previously introduced an earlier draft of this bill in 2022. The new version incorporates feedback from the community and expands ecological rights beyond the Great Lakes watershed to include all the waters of New York.
It also empowers municipalities and counties to democratically enact rights of nature laws for their local ecosystems. Many states have forbidden this practice. In addition, the new bill contains provisions to protect treaty rights for indigenous people and tribal nations in New York.
Burke represents New York’s 142nd district, made up of South Buffalo and the surrounding areas on and near the shore of Lake Erie. Buffalo is located less than 5 miles south of Lake Ontario.
This measure received overwhelming support in Burke’s constituent survey, including from Dr. Kirk Scirto, who received his medical doctorate at the University of Buffalo, teaches public health in the United States and internationally, and works as a clinician for the Tonawanda Seneca Nation.
“This bill means communities having the freedom to finally decide what corporations can and can’t do in their backyards,” Dr. Scirto says. “It means communities having the power to say ‘No!’ to outsiders who’d steal their resources and leave behind only contamination. It means having the ability to protect our waters–and therefore our health. It means justice!”
“For States to take action could be a game-changer”
The law was drafted with the assistance of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) which has been at the forefront of the rights of nature movement for more than 20 years, and incorporates input from constituents and tribal members living in the NY and Great Lakes ecosystems. Since writing the first law to recognize legal rights of ecosystems in 2006, CELDF has partnered with more than 200 communities across the United States to enact community rights and rights of nature laws.
“The rights of nature movement is gaining momentum around the world as global warming, species extinction, fresh water scarcity, and climate-driven migration are all getting worse,” says CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price, who helped draft the law. “Meanwhile, the U.S. is being left behind. For states to take on these issues in the absence of federal action could be a game-changer, as it was for women’s suffrage when the states led the way for years.”
The bill would also enshrine the right to a clean and healthy environment for all people and ecosystems within the State, the right to freedom from “toxic trespass,” and would prohibit the monetization of the waters of New York State.
The bill is of cross-border interest, and will be part of an upcoming symposium on the health of the Great Lakes in Toronto in March where CELDF will be presenting.
“Serious threats” to the waters of New York
Lake Erie and Lake Ontario provide drinking water to 6.2 million New Yorkers. All told, the Great Lakes provide drinking water for more than 40 million people, contain 95% of all the surface freshwater in the United States, and make up the largest freshwater ecosystem on the planet.
But this ecosystem is struggling. According to experts, billions of gallons of raw sewage entering the lakes, increasing toxic algae blooms, invasive species, global warming, and both historic and ongoing industrial pollution represent serious threats to the ecosystem and human health.
According to Dr. Sherri Mason from Gannon University in Erie Pennsylvania over 22 million pounds of plastic are dumped in the Great Lakes annually.
Experts such as Daniel Macfarlane, Professor of Environment and Sustainability at Western Michigan University, say that the people of the U.S. have become “complacent” after early efforts to clean up the Great Lakes curtailed obvious issues such as the Cuyahoga, Buffalo, and Chicago rivers catching fire due to petrochemical waste dumping in the 1960’s.
In August 2014, a toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie linked to fertilizer and excrement from industrial farms shut down the drinking water supply to the city of Toledo, Ohio, home to 270,000 people, for 3 days.
This led to the community to overwhelmingly vote to pass a similar law to the one introduced by Assemblyman Burke called the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which was also drafted by CELDF. The story of the pollution entering Lake Erie, the 2014 water shutdown, and the effort to protect the lake was profiled in a 2024 documentary produced by artist Andrea Bowers and titled What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves.
The Rights of Nature movement
Recognizing the legal rights of nature is becoming increasingly popular around the world. 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.
Just days ago, the Lewes District Council in East Sussex, England affirmed the Ouse River Charter, recognizing for the first time the rights of an English river.
The U.S. is lagging behind these international efforts, with only local communities asserting the rights of nature thus far. CELDF’s consulting director Tish O’Dell has worked with many of these communities.
“Brave people and communities have attempted to promote the new idea of rights of nature and challenge the current system, but we have never found a state legislator courageous enough to introduce such a law at the state level,” she says. “Representative Burke is the first to build on this grassroots movement for change.”
Feature image by Tim Stief on Unsplash
CELDF’s Living in Nature year-end campaign theme emerges from our Truth, Reckoning, and Right Relationship with the Great Lakes gathering, the release of CELDF’s “Wouldn’t You Say?” book, our time in the Amazon with the Sarayaku people, and the launch of a rights of nature continuing legal education series, among other projects, presentations, and community support efforts. We hope you enjoy the articles, factoids, features, and spotlights of the people who make CELDF the powerhouse that it is through our 2024 End-of-Year Newsletter.
Nearly every day, for almost 30 years now, people have been reaching out to CELDF for help. There is a knock at the door, and without hesitation, we welcome people in with a readiness to listen to what they have to say. We’ve had thousands of conversations leading to system-rattling challenges and changes and established long-running friendships with people and organizations from around the world. That willingness to be present, as well as being honest with those thousands of people is why CELDF has persevered over three decades and why we look to be around for years to come.
So thank you to those who have been supporting CELDF for a long time. And, an advanced thank you to all you new donors to CELDF. Individual donations are critical to our existence and continued work. We need your help. Communities and ecosystems all over the planet need our help.
All the best and happy holidays!
CELDF staff and partners
Written by Ben Price, CELDF Education Director and Terry Lodge, CELDF Legal Director
CELDF Response to “Can granting legal ‘personhood’ to nature stem biodiversity loss?” by Viktoria Kahui
On April 25th of 2024, The Conversation published “Can granting legal ‘personhood’ to nature stem biodiversity loss?” by Viktoria Kahui of the University of Otago. It was reprinted by GreenPeace on April 26th. Spoiler alert: Kahul’s article concludes legal personhood for nature cannot “stem” biodiversity loss, and we agree. But not at all for the same reasons.
We take exception to the article’s equating legal personhood of ecosystems with a rights of nature (RoN) framing. There are zero parallels. We understand how the author may have come to this misapprehension, given the frequency of environmental and journalistic imprecision on this point.
Neither The Conversation nor GreenPeace questioned the article’s conflation of ‘personhood’ as a fictional designation in law with the more fundamental, pre-existing, and unalienable rights of nature. Tellingly, corporate-backed opposition and official stalling over the adoption of real RoN legislation somehow didn’t occur to the authors as the true cause for the failure of attempts to challenge unjust legal precedent and to protect the natural environment through litigation and ballot initiatives, as well as adopting policy outlawing rights of nature in states like in Ohio, Utah, and Florida as a result of such attempts
A particularly sharp example of this unpardonable conflation of legal personhood and rights of nature appeared in multiple accounts of the changed legal status of the Whanganui River in New Zealand. For many years, the Māori people insisted the river and its watershed be assigned a special status commensurate with the reverence they hold for this sacred being. The Crown Government of New Zealand remained implacable to their entreaties, insisting the Commonwealth nation could not possibly relinquish sovereign power over Whanganui.
‘Personhood’ was the legal category settled upon. By ascribing personhood to the River, the Crown retained government supremacy over a particular river while seeming to confer entity status equal to that of corporations. The Whanganui acquired the power to sue, via human guardians representative of both Indigenous and colonial populations, but it also gained vulnerability to being sued, and the Crown retained an ultimate veto over the River’s assertion of rights.
Thus, while the River gained status as an independent entity to be reckoned with, for the first time, it was made liable for damage caused to human enterprises. The Whanganui could be enjoined from flourishing in the event human persons needed levees or to use aquacides to get rid of some species. A personified river that might overflow its banks could be targeted via countersuit to blunt claims brought by the Whanganui’s guardians to protect the River, or to assert leverage to structurally alter the River itself to mitigate harms to human enterprise.
The prospect of liability introduced by the conferral of personhood status monetizes the relationship between humans and the rest of nature. By pulling the River in as just another player, personhood portends a synthetic relationship that skews court scrutiny in favor of commerce and profit; all becomes grounded in the law of property. Hence the River was monetized and subordinated to capital. This is nowhere near the exceptional status intended for the River by rights of nature advocates. Legal personhood does very little to provide genuine protection of the ecological integrity of a huge watershed on which so many species depend. It does not cure the flaws of the failed environmental regulatory system.
The difficulty is not that RoN laws are too vague to be enforced. The rights to exist, flourish, evolve naturally, and be restored when harmed have unambiguous meaning and need no quantification. The Whanganui’s rights, in other words, provide the benchmarks and standards. Existence, flourishing, natural evolution, and restoration all have readily ascertainable meanings and counsel primacy of and protection of the River. Contrary to the vagueness criticism, the Whanganui possesses defined legal rights for enforcement by guardians.
The question then becomes, what guardians? Who, after all, will speak for the River? We think the answer should be obvious. The humans living in permanent relationship with a natural ecosystem are living members of that natural community. It is Indigenous and non-Indigenous resident human members of ecosystems who have the capacity and the inherent legal standing to speak for and enforce RoN as members of the local environment.
Instead of well-defined rights limited to what legal precedent can tolerate, in the future the Whanganui must be recognized as a being whose rights supersede: legalistic personification, property claims against it, sovereign dominion over it, and best practices for polluting industries. Its protection requires that the Whanganui be perceived, not as subject to human law, but that human law be located in the context of nature. This is the urgently needed alternative to anthropocentric policies like legal personhood and natural asset formulae that are designed to serve commerce while they fail the natural world.
Kahul takes pains to point out that RoN laws have been overturned primarily because the rights asserted for ecosystems have been non-quantifiable and thus legally vague in terms of enforcement through legal liability. But the fundamental rights of human beings, and those assigned to corporations, such as the right to free speech, demonstrate that legal rights are enumerated in very general terms. That they should be made specific in the case of nature for the convenience of litigants suggests a continuing anthropocentric bias that values quantified and therefore monetized relationships between people and nature.
This would be appropriate only by maintaining that human beings are external to nature instead of organic, co-participants in the natural world.
If we reject the underlying premise that nature is property to be managed within human legal frameworks, then human oversight of nature through legal fictions like personhood is by definition unnatural. Since human law currently recognizes only one legal status for nature — as property — adding a gloss of narrowly defined legal rights to that status would, at best, make nature no more than a favored slave.
Notably, Ecuador’s legal system sees nature not as a legal person but as an entity with a collection of broadly stated inherent rights. Ecuadorian courts have been issuing rulings that avoid the pitfalls that personhood presents while demonstrating that rulings in favor of nature aren’t suffering from vagueness of language.
Kahul’s conclusion is that biodiversity can only be protected through the same kind of administrative bureaucracy as the one that has regulated its destruction over the past half-century. But such mere revisions of the Public Trust Doctrine cannot succeed. Trusting government, with its anthropocentric politics, to engage in faithful stewardship of nature builds failure into the system. Concessions to colonial and imperial subjugation of natural communities – composed as they are of humans in inherent relationship within nature – allow the conceit of the Public Trust Doctrine to be substituted for rights inherently residing within an ecosystem.
By commodifying nature and dragging it into our legal frameworks, we subject it to the less-than-tender mercies of empire, which imposes universal monetization, privatization, and merely transactional social intercourse. These weapons of materialism do not respect rights inherent in nature – or humans – but instead, tether nature to the processes of its destruction. Unless there is a complete departure from legal precedent and adoption of exceptional and reverential status for natural communities that include human and other-than-human members, biodiversity will not survive, and neither will we.
What if, instead of shoehorning the whole of creation into human-made and commerce-friendly legal definitions, we take as real that which presents itself to us in the real world? What if the natural persons living as full-time residents of a local ecosystem become rightly identified as members of a natural community that includes the non-human environment as constituents of the community? Such an identity would attribute unassailable legal standing to the human part of the community. Indigenous or not, those members of every local ecosystem would have natural standing to speak on behalf of their unalienable rights.
Legally recognizing local human communities as constituent parts of ecosystems can initiate other non-legalistic shifts in our cultural worldview. Such changes have the potential to transform society, empower communities to make self-determinative decisions and reconstitute healthy intrinsic relationships between people and their environments in ways that western culture obliterates through colonial expansion and resource colonization.
Reunification of people with nature recommends an organic answer to the question of who should have legitimate authority to assert rights for the natural community. The call to erect new limited liability agencies to do the job with predictable insincerity promises more of what we’ve already seen. The rights of humans and of the other-than-human natural community would be vindicated. Perpetuation of the injustices bestowed by conquest, empire, the enclosures, privatization, and servitude could be overcome.
Why aren’t these options championed? Rights of Nature keeps running into attempts to quantify, valuate, and narrow down the scope of the rights recognized so that they don’t interfere with commercial priorities. Dancing around this fact and calling for narrowly defined rights and a legal status that creates legal liabilities for ecosystems indicate deep resistance to changing anything. Rights of nature encompasses human rights because humans are part of nature. Narrowing the scope of those rights to protect the privileged status of some continues the historic role of law in serving injustice.
On May 20, 2024, Rockland Sierra Club, Lower Hudson Group and ROAR (Religious Orders Along the River) hosted this conversation titled: SHOULD RIVERS AND TREES HAVE LEGAL RIGHTS?
A new movement is growing around the rights of nature, arguing that rivers, lakes, and forests should have legal rights for themselves, not for their value to human beings. Life on earth depends on the integrity of these ecosystems. Is this just another strategy, or is it a very different way of viewing the world, expanding our moral compass circle to include nature?
Peggy Kurtz of Rockland Sierra Club introduces and moderates the conversation.
Sister Carol De Angelo of ROAR introduces her organization’s work in environmental justice and connecting humans to the natural environment.
Tish O’Dell, Consulting Director for the Community Environmental Defense Fund, presents some background on this new movement, which is based on traditional ways of honoring the natural world, and then opens up the conversation to participants in the meeting.
Watch the discussion HERE.
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As 2023 draws to a close, we at CELDF are truly grateful for your friendship and support.
With your support, CELDF can deliver the expertise it possesses, provide the outreach and education needed, and support place-based action that works to push for transformational change for People and Nature; People are Nature. As we have in this year’s end-of-year newsletter as well as last year’s, CELDF subscribes to the need to bring together the fact that we live from Nature, with Nature, in Nature, and as Nature.
If you haven’t already, please make your 2023 year-end, tax-deductible gift in support of Community Rights and Rights of Nature TODAY.
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