The United States Professor Christopher D. Stone first discussed the idea of attributing legal personality to natural objects in the 1970s, in his article "Should trees have standing?
[6][7] The Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, brought this suit against then Secretary of the Interior of the United States, Roger C. B. Morton[8] stating that the federal government, according to the Administrative Procedure Act, could not grant permits for developers to build infrastructure – specifically a highway, powerlines, and a ski resort – in the Mineral King Valley, part of the Sequoia National Forest.
[9] The Sierra Club aimed to protect this undeveloped land within the national forest, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had stated that because the members of the Sierra Club would not be directly affected they could not sue under the Administrative Procedure Act,[9] which "provides standards for judicial review" for instances where a person is negatively impacted by an agency action, such as granting a permit.
[9] This ruling led Supreme Court Justice William Douglas to write his dissenting opinion, arguing that people should be allowed to sue on behalf of non-living things writing, "[t]hose who have that intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled are its legitimate spokesmen.
[11] The area encompassed by Te Urewera ceased to be a government-owned national park and was transformed into freehold, inalienable land owned by itself.
[13] This new legal entity was named Te Awa Tupua and is now recognised as "an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the Whanganui River and all of its physical and metaphysical elements.
[15] Also in 2017, the New Zealand government signed an agreement granting similar legal personality to Mount Taranaki and pledging a name change for Egmont National Park, which surrounds the mountain.
The rivers are sacred to Hindu culture for their healing powers and attraction of pilgrims who bathe and scatter the ashes of their dead.
[19] The High Court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered in March 2017 that the Ganges and its main tributary, the Yamuna, be assigned the status of legal entities.
[19] This development of environmental personhood has been met with scepticism as merely announcing that the Ganges and Yamuna are living entities will not save them from significant, ongoing pollution.
[20] Regardless of scepticism surrounding the decision of the Uttarakhand High Court, proclaiming these vulnerable rivers as legal entities invokes a movement of change towards environmental and cultural rights protection.
In 2006, the borough of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, worked with a rights of nature group called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).
[27] This ordinance made Mora County the very first place within the United States to ban the production of gas and oil, within a certain area, in an official statement.
A company named Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) had converted an old oil and gas well into a "wastewater injection well," and residents became concerned for what that could mean for the natural ecosystems surrounding their township.
"[34] Residents of Toledo, and surrounding areas, have suffered times where the tap water, which comes from Lake Erie, was not safe to drink, or use, due to pollution.
[34][36] On 27 February 2020, U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary invalidated the bill,[37] ruling it was "unconstitutionally vague" and beyond "the power of municipal government in Ohio.
"[43] The first successful case of the rights of nature implementation under Ecuador constitutional law was presented before the Provincial Court of Justice of Loja in 2011.
This case was brought before court by two individuals, Richard Frederick Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle, as legal guardians acting in favour of nature – specifically the Vilcabamba River.
A constitutional injunction was granted in favour of the Vilcabamba River and against the Provincial government of Loja, attempting to conduct the environmentally-harmful project.
Judicial action can be taken for infringements against individuals and groups as part of Mother Earth as 'a collective subject of public interest'.
"[48] The Colombia Constitutional Court found in November 2016 that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to "protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration."
It is a question of understanding this new sociopolitical reality with the aim of achieving a respectful transformation with the natural world and its environment, as has happened before with civil and political rights…Now is the time to begin taking the first steps to effectively protect the planet and its resources before it is too late...In April 2018 the Supreme Court of Colombia has issued a decision recognizing the Amazon River ecosystem as a subject of rights and beneficiary of protection.
Community Environmental Defense Fund lawyer Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin writes that this concern is "one of the things that could derail in my opinion the ability for rights in nature to be a check on destructive activities and instead could set up kind of like natural resource trustees for ecosystems where there's a flood and now the ecosystem has to pay out of the fund that would otherwise have gone to restoring habitat that had been destroyed.
Māori culture considers natural features such as the Whanganui River as ancestors and iwi hold deep connections with them as living entities.
[54] This inalienable connection of indigenous culture to their natural surroundings is apparent in other parts of the world such as Colombia where a similar environmental personhood declaration was made for the Atrato River basin.
"[55] James D K Morris and Jacinta Ruru suggest that giving "legal personality to rivers is one way in which the law could develop to provide a lasting commitment to reconciling with Maori."