Rights of nature
As of May 2024, close to 500 rights of nature laws exist at the local to national levels in 40 countries, including dozens of cities and counties throughout the United States.
Drafters of the UDHR stated their belief that the concept of fundamental human rights arose not from "the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing.
[3][4][13] Some notable proponents of this approach include U.S. cultural historian Thomas Berry,[8][9] South African attorney Cormac Cullinan, Indian physicist and eco-social advocate Vandana Shiva, and Canadian law professor and U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and the Environment David R.
[7][8][9] Earth Jurisprudence has been increasingly recognized and promoted worldwide by legal scholars, the United Nations, lawmakers, philosophers, ecological economists, and other experts as a foundation for Earth-centered governance, including laws and economic systems that protect the fundamental rights of nature.
[5] Christopher Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California, wrote extensively on this topic in his seminal essay, "Should Trees Have Standing", cited by a U.S. Supreme Court dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton for the position that "environmental issues should be tendered by [nature] itself.
[27] However, decades after the Directive's adoption, despite scientific advances in identifying flow-ecology relationships, there remains no EU definition of "ecological flow", nor a common understanding of how it should be calculated.
[30] The first major textbook on ecological science that described the natural world as a system rather than a collection of different parts, was not written until 1983.
[33] Since then, scientific disciplines have been converging and advancing on the concept that humans live in a dynamic, relationship-based world that "den[ies] the possibility of isolation".
[3] Nineteenth century linguist and scholar Edward Payson Evans, an early rights of nature theorist and author of "the first extensive American statement of (...) environmental ethics",[6] wrote that each human is "truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and [the] attempt to set him up on an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious".
Leopold offered implementation guidance for his position, stating that a "thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
[41] Court decisions including examples in Ecuador, Colombia and India have relied on these scientific developments in recognizing, interpreting and giving content to the legal rights of nature.
[45] A 2012 international Declaration of Indigenous Peoples found that modern laws destroy the earth because they do not respect the "natural order of Creation".
[59] In both Hinduism and Buddhism, karma ("action" or "declaration" in Sanskrit) reflects the reality of humanity's networked interrelations with Earth and universe.
"[4][64] More recently, Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Catholic Church, reflected that, "[t]he obedience to the voice of Earth is more important for our future happiness... than the desires of the moment.
[68] He warned against humanity's current path, stating that "the deepest roots of our present failures" lie in the direction and meaning of economic growth, and the overarching rule of a "deified market".
[66][69][67] The Qur’an, Islam's primary authority in all matters of individual and communal life, reflects that "the whole creation praises God by its very being".
[70] Scholars describe the "ultimate purpose of the Shari'ah"[71] as "the universal common good, the welfare of the entire creation,"[71] and note that "not a single creature, present or future, may be excluded from consideration in deciding a course of action.
[6] Peter Burdon, professor at the University of Adelaide Law School and an Earth Jurisprudence scholar, has expanded upon Nash's analysis, offering that seventeenth century English philosopher and physician John Locke's transformative natural rights thesis led to the American Revolution, through the concept that the British monarchy was denying colonists their natural rights.
[75][74] Nineteenth-century linguist and scholar Edward Payson Evans observed that:[36][6] [i]n tracing the history of the evolution of ethics we find the recognition of mutual rights and duties confined at first to members of the same horde or tribe, then extended to worshippers of the same gods, and gradually enlarged so as to include every civilized nation, until at length all races of men are at least theoretically conceived as being united in a common bond of brotherhood and benevolent sympathy, which is now slowly expanding so as to comprise not only the higher species of animals, but also every sensitive embodiment of organic life.
[6] For example, Aldo Leopold's land ethic explicitly recognized nature's "right to continued existence"[11] and sought to "change the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it".
[80][81] For example, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, pollution from Texaco's (now Chevron) oil drilling operations from 1967 to 1992 resulted in an epidemic of birth defects, miscarriages, and an estimated 1,400 cancer deaths, that were particularly devastating to indigenous communities.
These operations further caused more than one million acres of deforestation and polluted local waterways with 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater and contaminants, severely damaging a formerly pristine rainforest of extraordinary biodiversity.
[19][84] Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe theorized further that "choosing to accord nature a fraternal rather than an exploited role... might well make us different persons from the manipulators and subjugators we are in danger of becoming".
[84][5] In addition to Stone's legal work, other late twentieth and early twenty-first century drivers of the rights of nature movement include indigenous perspectives and the work of the indigenous rights movement;[24][88] the writings of Arne Naess and the Deep Ecology movement;[89][90] Thomas Berry's 2001 jurisprudential call for recognizing the laws of nature as the "primary text";[4][91] the publication of Cormac Cullinan's Wild Law book in 2003, followed by the creation of an eponymous legal association in the UK;[3] growing concern about corporate power through the expansion of legal personhood for corporations;[4] adoption by U.S. communities of local laws addressing rights of nature; the creation of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature in 2010 (GARN; a nonprofit advancing rights on nature worldwide); and mounting global concerns with species losses, ecosystem destruction, and the existential threat of climate change.
[98] The UDRME addresses enforcement by requiring "damages caused by human violations of the inherent rights"[98] to be "rectified",[98] with those responsible "held accountable".
[102][95][103] As of 2021 rights of nature has been reflected in treaties, constitutions, court decisions, and statutory and administrative law at all levels of government.
[108][78][79] The development of stronger and more active transnational rights of nature networks during the early 2000s, is a likely cause for the greater adoption of those championed principles into law.
[122] The goal of the tribunals is to provide formal public recognition, visibility, and voice to the people and natural systems injured by alleged violations of fundamental rights and marginalized in current law, and to offer a model for redress for such injuries.
[129] A documentary film entitled Invisible Hand about the rights of nature movement, directed by Joshua Boaz Pribanic and Melissa Troutman of Public Herald, was released in 2020, executive-produced and narrated by actor Mark Ruffalo.
[131] The Overstory, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, examined relationships with and rights of trees.
