As you might expect, corporate leaders have responded to the Rights of Nature movement—which seeks to fundamentally rethink the way humans interact with ecosystems, ensuring the natural world’s freedom to flourish—with the same calm consideration and civil respect that they always give to any extension of democratic power.
“Eeeeekkk,” they shriek in unison. “The sky is falling!” If nature has rights, they argue, businesses and humans will have none.
“You can’t do anything to the land,” exclaimed one of their delirious lawyers. “You can’t farm it, you can’t put new roads in, you can’t do any landscaping.” None of this is true.
We are one with the natural world and must find ways to cooperate fully with it for our own survival.
Profiteering industries and their political screechers are trying to demonize this strikingly sensible rights movement. It’s an honest, pragmatic, effective, and popular alternative to today’s status quo “regulatory” charade that basically serves and protects nature’s violators. It is about the right of other creatures to exist and not be sickened with some corporation’s chemical waste.
That’s why the Rights of Nature idea has taken hold and why it is spreading rapidly worldwide. In little more than a decade, national parliaments, courts, and even constitutions in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nepal, India, New Zealand, and Uganda are incorporating the concept into their legal systems; campaigns are now underway to adopt versions of it in a dozen more nations.
And while mass media in the United States have generally ignored the remarkable adoption of this principle around the world, it has nonetheless quietly taken root across our own country. In addition to actions by various tribal nations (including the Ho-Chunk, Nez Perce, Ojibwe, and Yurok), more than three dozen U.S. communities have enacted enforceable Rights of Nature provisions. It’s especially notable that this grassroots legal rebellion against the do-nothing system of environmental protection is not arising from predictable liberal enclaves, but mainly in working-class communities.
Consider Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania coal country. In 2006, it enacted the world’s first Rights of Nature ordinance. City council member Cathy Morelli was working with a growing group of locals outraged that their area had become “a sacrifice zone” for dumping toxic sludge and other industrial waste. Unsurprisingly, Tamaqua was suffering a devastating outbreak of rare, fatal cancers. Meanwhile, business and regulatory leaders insisted that tests found no environmental links to the diseases—and proposed even more dumping permits.
Realizing the regulatory game was just a runaround, Morelli urgently sought a real remedy; she found Thomas Linzey, a lawyer and activist who was thinking outside the traditional legal box. He helped her draft an ordinance that included the novel method of bypassing regulators by extending legally enforceable rights directly to “natural communities” and ecosystems, empowering them to protect their local environment from corporate harm.
Though Tamaqua is solidly Republican, its residents backed the straightforward, democratic directness of Morelli’s ordinance. Sixteen years later, it remains in force. It has helped deter more toxic dumping and made Tamaqua an inspiration to the global movement for nature’s rights.
You might expect people in California, Colorado, or other bastions of ecological activism to be pushing this advance in democratic policymaking—and they are. But grassroots groups in less expected battlegrounds such as Toledo, Ohio; Columbia, South Carolina; and Mora County, New Mexico, are also mounting feisty campaigns.
And guess which state is the epicenter of today’s Rights of Nature political movement? Florida! Yes, that Trumpian fantasyland where rightwing politicians routinely permit land developers to run schemes that ravage nature in pursuit of quick-buck profits.
At its core, the Rights of Nature movement is asserting the obvious: Earth’s biosphere is not a free candy store for our taking. We are one with the natural world and must find ways to cooperate fully with it for our own survival. As activist leader Mari Margil puts it, “The organizing never ends. That’s the case in any social justice movement, and the Rights of Nature isn’t an exception.”
To learn more and connect to action, go to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.