The Earth Doesn’t Need Rights—We Need to Give Them to Her
This is the final part of the series Rivers As Relatives: Reimagining Our Relationship With Water. [Read Part 1] [Read Part 2] [Read Part 3]
Should the Earth have legal rights? Here’s a better question: does the Earth need them?
As mother to us all and provider of everything that allows us to live—food, water, air, shelter, the very bodies we inhabit—she’s the one in charge here. We humans are the lucky recipients of her supremely generous and permissive planetary disposition. A less forgiving mother would have sent her unruly human children away a very long time ago.
So from that perspective, no, she doesn’t need legal rights. We humans do, however, desperately need the transformation of consciousness that will allow us to give them to her.
For millennia, Indigenous peoples have known that the Earth is a living, conscious being whom humans have a sacred duty to honor and respect. That her existence holds far more significance than the plots of land we divide up to be bought, sold, and developed.
And for them, the same is true for all of the Earth’s other children. Her salmon and swans, her rivers and redbuds, her mountains and moss—all relatives, brothers and sisters who have populated this planet for far longer than any human. They are our kin, our companions, and our wise teachers. Each one has a deep well of knowledge to share because they have more experience in living than we do.
This indigenous worldview has finally made it into our modern system of law:
The legal concept is called rights of nature,
and it’s spreading all over the world.
As I’ve written about in this series, we’ve dammed our rivers [The Dam Issue(s)], treated salmon as commodities [What the Salmon Know About Progress], and forced the living Earth to provide more than she was willing. But the salmon fought back in court [When Salmon Became Plaintiffs], asserting their inherent rights to exist, flourish, and regenerate. Their case is part of a much larger movement—one that’s transforming how we understand our relationship with all of nature.
Thomas Linzey is the co-founder of and senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER). He is a former environmental attorney who has pioneered this area of law. He drafted the first ever rights of nature law for a borough in Pennsylvania back in 2006. In his words,
“What we’re talking about is recognizing human civil rights type protections for nature.”
Our current legal framework sees all of nature as property: an inanimate thing that is meant to be used—bought, sold, owned, and destroyed. The indigenous perspective sees nature as a fellow living being who, like humans, is naturally endowed with rights.
Rights of nature is the legal mechanism that will merge indigenous values with our Western system of law; allowing us to shift to our rightful role as caretaker, not dominator, of nature. Our laws are the formal rules by which we, as a society, agree to operate. This shift will affect our legal system, of course, but the real power of rights of nature is that it will change our individual minds and our collective consciousness.
As our courts begin to recognize—or even simply discuss—nature’s right to live and flourish alongside our own, something shifts in our society. We start to see these types of conversations as normal. The law reminds us what we once knew:
We are not separate from the living world, but woven into its fabric.
This is the beginning of our long-awaited return to balance and harmony with the rest of our Earth relatives.
According to Linzey, we need rights of nature because our current system of environmental laws is designed to permit harms. Rather than protecting nature, it makes pollution seem normal:
“Public interest environmental lawyers spend our time arguing not over whether pollution should occur, but over how much will be allowed. And not over whether toxic chemicals can be dumped into the air or water, but how much can be dumped. We are forever stuck in fights about how activities such as fracking will happen, not whether they should happen at all.”
The Earth, like any good mother, knows how to help her humans tuck in their shirts, learn their manners, and return to their original sanity. She is always giving us ways to get ourselves back on track. Giving her legal rights is one way of doing that, and like all children, we can choose whether or not to listen to her. The good news is that, this time, humans are paying attention.
Rights of nature laws are being adopted all over the world.
The first ever rights of nature law, drafted by Thomas Linzey, was adopted in 2006 by a small borough in Pennsylvania. It was the only legal way for that community to prevent PCB-laden dredge waste from being dumped on their land. Then in 2008, the country of Ecuador incorporated rights of nature into their national constitution.
To date, further rights of nature laws have been adopted in Canada, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Peru, Spain, India, Bangladesh, and Uganda. In the United States, seven tribal governments, the City of Pittsburgh, PA, Orange County, FL, and communities in nine other states have given legally enforceable rights to nature.
Rights are in place for rivers including the Amazon, the Snake and the Klamath in the US, the Magpie in Canada, and all rivers in the country of Bangladesh. And a mountain in Colorado now holds the title to its own land.
Again, in Linzey’s words,
“I personally have no doubt that . . . the default for environmental law in the next 20 to 25 years is going to be rights of nature.”
If the logical side of your brain is arguing that rivers can’t go to court, remember this: within our legal system, we already make it possible for ships to sue each other.
As with all sweeping transformations, this one will take time. Not only for society to shift its worldview, but for the practical work of implementation. Who speaks for the rivers? How do we honor rights that flow across jurisdictions? What happens when pollution upstream violates a river’s rights downstream?
Our Earth Mother, with her wide-ranging rivers, majestic mountain ranges, and vast ecosystems, doesn’t follow our neatly defined political boundaries. Straight lines and right angles are ours, not hers. Instead, she challenges us to break down the barriers that separate us from each other, from our nature relatives, and from her.
Giving legal rights to nature will help us meet her challenge. And in doing so, we might finally become the children she always knew we could be.
For more on rights of nature:
The following videos and webinars are all sourced from the CDER website.
Rights of Nature 101: January 2021 – Start here for an overview.
Rights of Nature: Expressing Interconnectedness in Law – The talk by Natalia Greene on her work in Ecuador (min. 27:00) is especially energizing and inspiring.
The Rights of Nature: Saving the Planet or Harmful to Humanity? – This is a good for and against debate, if you want to hear an opposing viewpoint.