“Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation,” wrote Douglas. He asserted that “the critical question of ‘standing’ would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated…in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers.” Douglas contended that those who “have a meaningful relation” to a specific part of nature, who “frequent it or visit it merely to sit in solitude and wonderment,” should be able to have standing and act as its legal representative. 

“The problem is to make certain that the inanimate objects, which are the very core of America’s beauty, have spokesmen before they are destroyed,” concluded Douglas.

THREE DECADES LATER, in 2006, it happened: Tamaqua Borough, a tiny town about 35 miles northwest of Allentown in Pennsylvania’s coal country, became the first place in the world to codify the rights of nature in law. The law, entitled the “Sewage Sludge Ordinance,” sought to ban waste corporations from dumping in Tamaqua any longer, stating that “ecosystems shall be considered ‘persons’ for the purposes of the enforcement of [their] civil rights.” Although the law has never been tested in court, it has been credited with preventing further waste dumping.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first sovereign country to recognize the rights of nature in its national constitution, declaring that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycle, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.” It also granted nature “the right to be restored” and resolved the issue of standing in the most painless way possible: by granting it to everyone. In Ecuador, any person can represent any piece of land in court — full stop. 

In 2011, the owners of “the Garden of Paradise,” a property on the banks of the Vilcabamba River, invoked Ecuador’s constitutional provision to challenge a government highway project that was filling the river with excavated rocks and causing it to flood surrounding properties. With the river acting as plaintiff, a provincial court halted the project, effectively upholding the Rights of Nature provision. And in 2021, a series of decisions by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court further affirmed the rights of nature, blocking, among other actions, mining activities in the famously biodiverse Los Cedros forest. 

“We’ve seen the rights of rivers upheld in Bangladesh, along with a landmark decision from its Supreme Court calling upon governmental agencies to push back against illegal encroachment on the rivers,” says Grant Wilson. “We’ve seen the rights of Mar Menor, a saltwater lagoon in Spain, be recognized through national law and held up in their constitutional court, with legal guardians appointed to speak for and as the lagoon in a legal sense, just like a child might have a legal guardian. In other words, the lagoon has a voice in government.”

The Rights of Nature doctrine has surfaced in international codes and agreements. In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Resolution on Harmony With Nature, and has renewed it each year since. The resolutions seek to develop a “new, non-anthropocentric paradigm in which the fundamental basis for right and wrong action concerning the environment is grounded not solely in human concerns.” 

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a legally binding agreement signed in 1992, has declared a goal of global harmony with nature by 2050, endorsing the Rights of Nature as one possible pathway. Every nation in the world is party but four — Andorra, Iraq, Somalia, and the U.S., which has signed but not ratified the treaty.

In 2015, Pope Francis demanded the UN prioritize the rights of nature — “It must be stated that a true ‘right of the environment’ does exist,” he said — over society’s “selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity.” He asserted that “any harm done to the environment, therefore is harm done to humanity.”

In 2010, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, became the first major U.S. city to adopt and make legally enforceable the rights of nature, recognizing them as part of a ban on shale gas drilling and fracking. In 2017, the City Council of Lafayette, Colorado, population 30,000, passed the Climate Bill of Rights, an ordinance that — along with prohibiting the extraction of oil and gas — recognized ecosystems’ rights to clean water and clean air, as well as to be free from chemical trespass, to exist, and to flourish. Just last December, a ballot initiative in the city of Everett, Washington, granted legally enforceable rights — to exist, regenerate, and flourish — to the Snohomish River watershed. 

FOR ALL OF AMERICA’S 248 years, its legal system has existed in service of human beings. In the eyes of the law, the environment matters only in human terms — how it serves as our property, how it generates revenue for our economy, how it produces the raw materials we rely on, how it provides recreation sites for our use, and how it affects our health. Even environmental legislation like the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1972 Clean Water Act were only passed in order to make the environment safer for humans. 

“If there is a forest cut down, to challenge that [in court] under the doctrine of standing, you have to show that a human was harmed by the forest being cut down,” explains Wilson. 

But according to the principles of Rights of Nature, environmental damage alone, regardless of whether any humans are affected, is enough to hold up in court. “The key thing to know is that under a Rights of Nature framework, you’re determining whether and how humans can respectfully take from nature, and you’re really considering what’s in the best interest of the larger community of life,” says Wilson. “Current laws are really rooted in human superiority to nature.” 

To change this system means to fundamentally change how we relate to and conceive of nature. “Humans don’t simply live on a stage upon which only their own drama unfolds, as if trees and plants and animals and birds are just props in that human production,” Dr. Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist who has studied Indigenous cultures extensively, tells Rolling Stone. “On the contrary, every living being, from the grandest blue whale down to a microscopic amoeba, is part of the living organism that is the Earth.” 

Christopher Stone thought as much: “I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth…as one organism,” he wrote, “of which Mankind is a functional part — the mind, perhaps: different from the rest of nature, but different as a man’s brain is from his lungs.”

This line of thinking is deeply rooted in Indigenous customs. For the Maori, for example, in New Zealand, humans are lowest on the totem pole of the natural world, says Meghan Robinson, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia who is completing her doctoral research on the Rights of Nature. And to the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples in Colombia, says Davis, the water that runs down a river is no different from the blood that runs through one’s veins. 

But can the American legal system — and the society that governs it — change so radically that it sees nature as something more than simply a way to boost the GDP? As something sacred? Davis thinks yes. “All cultures are constantly changing. We preserve jam, not culture.”

“The very idea that a river could be considered to have rights would have been so inconceivably preposterous to my father’s generation,” he says. “I mean, my father’s generation was raised to believe that oil left in the ground was wealth wasted. That a tree left standing in the forest was money down the drain. The entire idea of an environmental or ecological ethos, things that we now take to be common, was completely off the charts and radical at that time.”

“We are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’ to be a decree of Nature, not a legal convention acting in support of some status quo,” wrote Stone in 1972. “The fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable.”

No matter how much we talk circles around it, American economic progress invariably comes with the exploitation of nature. Thus, the endowing of nature with rights will require some concessions on the part of humans, chiefly “a willingness to suspend the rate of increase in the standard of living,” as Stone put it. “We may have to … subordinate some human claims to those of the environment.”

Justice Douglas, in his 1972 dissenting opinion, warned against letting the “bulldozers of ‘progress’ … plow under all the aesthetic wonders of this beautiful land.” 

Of course, it is necessary, for basic human survival, to take advantage of natural resources. But there are truly hard lines to draw when it comes to defining what taking is permissible and what constitutes an unacceptable violation of the rights of nature — especially when harming and healing the environment may go hand in hand. Michael Gerrard, a prominent environmental lawyer and professor at Columbia Law School, describes one such scenario to Rolling Stone: “We know that one of the most important things we need to do in order to fight climate change is to build a massive number of solar farms. Some of them will go in the desert. What if the desert had rights and could sue to prevent the solar farms from being built — which would be bad for the environment in general but might be good for the desert? The desert’s lawyer would have the obligation to do everything they could to protect the desert.”

But perhaps this dilemma is not as insurmountable as it seems. “You’re inserting this new rights holder — nature — into the mix, and it’s going to cause some tensions with other rights, as well as economic [and development] interests,” says Wilson. “Yet in the legal system, there’s tension between different rights all of the time — and the courts figure out how to balance those.” 

“We live on a finite planet, but we’re trying to say that we can have infinite growth — and that thought process is so unbelievably flawed,” says Meghan Robinson. “We need to come up with a different economic system that doesn’t think that we can grow infinitely in an unsustainable way. [If we don’t,] the environment is just going to wipe us out.”

IN THE PAST DECADE or so, the Rights of Nature movement in the U.S. has become a battleground for fights over local sovereignty and corporatocracy. Numerous state legislatures, heavily lobbied by commercial industries, have preempted or challenged Rights of Nature laws, rendering them null, void, and wholly unenforceable. Four states — Florida, Ohio, Idaho, and Utah — have even gone as far as to summarily ban Rights of Nature legislation.

Tish O’Dell is a lifelong Ohioan who grew up 10 miles from the shores of Lake Erie. “I was always mesmerized by Lake Erie, even as a small child,” she says. So when she learned of fracking taking place in her community, she went to her local elected officials. “[Former Ohio senator] Sherrod Brown was in office, and me and another mom sat across from him with a folder of photos of toxic waste pits in our neighborhood and told him we didn’t want our community poisoned,” she says. “He just muttered back about all the jobs [fracking] was creating. It was then that [it hit me] that no one was coming to save my community or the environment.” 

O’Dell proceeded to work with mothers from across Ohio (forming Mothers Against Drilling In Our Neighborhoods) to pass a 2012 Rights of Nature amendment in Broadview Heights, Ohio. When the local amendment was overturned by the Ohio Supreme Court in 2015, she went on, with the help of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), to propose more than 40 Rights of Nature laws throughout the state. Her crusade culminated in the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), approved by Toledo, Ohio, voters in 2019, which recognized the lake’s rights to “exist, flourish and naturally evolve.”

Yet U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary, in a harshly written opinion, struck down LEBOR, overturning the first U.S. law ever to affirm the rights of a particular ecosystem on the grounds that it was unconstitutionally vague and oustripped the municipality’s authority. 

“LEBOR’s authors failed to make hard choices regarding the appropriate balance between environmental protection and economic activity. Instead, they employed language that sounds powerful but has no practical meaning,” wrote Zouhary. “What conduct infringes the right of Lake Erie and its watershed to ‘exist, flourish, and naturally evolve?’ How would a prosecutor, judge, or jury decide? LEBOR offers no guidance.” 

In 2020, things seemed to look up for the movement when Grant Township’s 2014 Rights of Nature law became the first such piece of legislation to be enforced by a state, with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) citing it in rescinding a fracking waste injection permit. Although the law has since been swept into a years-long saga of lawsuits — the ordinance was overturned and then enshrined into a Home Rule Charter, all while the DEP switched its stance back and forth — there is still no injection well. 

So what’s next? 

“I think it’s likely that one state is going to pass a Rights of Nature framework and it’s going to propel the movement to a whole different level,” predicts Wilson. 

Once implemented, Rights of Nature legislation potentially affords a whole host of litigation advantages. For starters, it could completely wipe away the challenges of fulfilling standing requirements, which have traditionally been extremely vulnerable to the whims of judges — particularly conservative ones — seeking to constrict them. Moreover, litigating on behalf of a natural entity greatly diminishes the burden of proof, for one need not prove a human was harmed, only that the specific part of nature at hand was harmed. 

The reality is that the widespread implementation of the Rights of Nature doctrine in the United States is not going to come quickly or easily. “Someone told me once that it takes about 200 miles to turn a big Boeing 747 around, and I think that’s a fitting metaphor,” says Wilson. 

But progress is progress. “All these things are aggregate. Aggregate and cumulative,” says Davis. “The movement itself is a statement that the mindset has already changed.”