(Tompkins Weekly, 8-12-26, by Elizabeth Keokosky)
As early as 1972 American law professor Christopher Stone wrote a detailed, 52-page, seminal article, “Should trees have standing – toward legal rights for natural objects.” Stone writes, “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable.” The article acknowledges the difficulty of re-envisioning slaves, women, children- each thought of as property in their time – as possessors of their own rights and destinies.
Stone proposed that we give legal rights to forest, oceans, river, and other so-called “natural objects in the environment – indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.” The method he suggested was application to the court for guardianship by a friend of the natural object (such as the Sierra Club) or even a private individual. His thought was that, if the environment becomes an active stakeholder in judicial outcomes, the inevitable compromise between human and nature’s economies would become more balanced, and costs to the environment and future generations could no longer be ignored or underestimated.
Years later, Stone inspired another group, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). Organized in 1995 in Pennsylvania, CELDF switched its focus from enforcing existing environmental law when they realized standard laws accept pollution and regulate only how much is allowed to occur (for instance, the violator is charged a fine, but many consider it the cost of doing business). Instead, CELDF used the transformative concept of the Rights of Nature (RoN) to move the imagination beyond the deep-seated legal constructs that only recognize nature as property.
Around 2010, a new type of fossil fuel extraction, fracking, galvanized CELDF and other environmental protesters. Fracking involves injecting high-pressure fluid—mostly water, sand, and chemicals—into shale formations to crack the rock and release trapped oil or gas. Fracking pollutes air with methane and water with chemicals, but corporations were given loopholes to the Clean Air Act. In 2015 New York permanently banned fracking; Pennsylvania embraced it. But, for some dissenting municipalities, fracking prompted embattled opposition. CELDF helped the Tamaqua Borough in Schuylkill County draft and pass the first law in the world recognizing the legal “Rights of Nature” in 2006. In 2010 they worked with the City of Pittsburgh to draft a community bill of rights banning fracking, making it the first major U.S. municipality to do so. CELDF work is grounded on building community resilience and resistance to unchecked corporate power.
CELDF is internationally recognized and went on to act as an advisor on legalization of RoN in Ecuador and other countries. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to set into law the concept that rivers and mountains and ecosystems have rights. Ecuador’s landmark constitution recognizes and protects the inherent RoN and declares that all peoples have a right to benefit from the environment and enjoy the natural riches that surround us and allow us to have “sumac kawsay,” – “a harmonious life” as spoken in indigenous languages throughout the rainforest . Lisa María Madera, who lived near the San Pedro River all her life and mourned its deterioration, writes, “Nature is a subject to the rights recognized in the constitution… By declaring Nature as a subject of rights, the constitution turns the tables, creating a shift that changes the fundamental grammar defining our relationship to the living world. Nature is no longer an inanimate, sense-less, object to be used and abused at our whimsy and will – instead – like us, Pachamama is a sentient subject, a living, evolving being standing alongside us–in the unfolding spiral of life–with equal rights under the law.”
Since then, Bolivia (2010), Panama (2022), Uganda and Spain (2022) have all passed national laws that legislate some aspect of the rights of Mother Earth. In 2017 the New Zealand government gave up legal ownership of the Whanganui River and granted it the legal rights of personhood after a nearly 150-year-old battle fought by the Māori people, and eventually their allies/advocates. The law accepts Māori worldview that the river is an ancestor and the “Ruruku Whakatupua”—Deed of Settlement – recognizes the river as an “indivisible and living whole comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating its tributaries and its physical and metaphysical elements.”
Not surprising, the countries on the forefront of the RoN movement are often being led by active indigenous populations, who see everything as interconnected, rivers and mountains as ancestors, and animals as kin. The RoN movement and Indigenous worldviews have shifted the environmental protection narrative
Laws need a support system to be effective. They need to be enforceable and gain judicial backing with precedents tested over time. In some ways these RoN laws are just symbolic, but the human community badly needs to imagine a “positive framework for environmental governance” that works with nature, not against her. Acknowledging the truth of “Nature’s Rights” gives a much-needed adjustment to the destructive fiction of “Corporate Personhood.”
Elizabeth Keokosky is a biomass advocate at Community Biomass Energy.
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