Rights of nature

Giving rivers, mountains and forests legal rights
Article by Jane Gleeson-White

2008 Ecuador enshrines rights of nature in law
2014  New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Te Uruwera forest
2017 and to the Whanganui river and Mount Taranaki
2017 An Indian court granted legal personhood to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers
2017 Colombia awarded rights to the Atrato river

Rights for nature were first proposed by Christopher Stone in his 1972 article “Should trees have standing?” and were famously endorsed by Justice William O Douglas’s dissenting judgment in Sierra Club v Morton, in which he argued that trees should be granted personhood and have the ability to sue for their own protection, effectively blocking the development of Walt Disney ski resort inside the Sequoia national park. Stone argued that leaving behind the enlightenment view of nature as a collection of “useful senseless objects” would not only help to solve the planet’s material problems but would encourage a heightened awareness of nature.

“Any system that puts no value on the life around us is wrong, it’s as simple as that,” says Dr Michelle Maloney, who co-founded the Australian Earth Laws Alliance in 2012 to promote rights-of-nature law in Australia. She says rights of nature is inspired and led by Indigenous traditions of Earth-centred law and culture, but it’s also “whitefellas talking back to the white system”.



“It’s looking back to the western legal governance system and going, ‘What kind of culture develops the systems we have now that created such devastation? Can rights of nature be a bridge into a different, Earth-centred way of being?’”


Dr Anne Poelina