Right of nature

It began more than a decade ago, in South America, when Ecuador and then Bolivia gave constitutional recognition to Pachamama – Mother Earth – declaring that she has the right to live. And the movement continues to bubble, at levels both national and local.

The Rights of Nature movement, as it tinkers with governmental bureaucracies on every continent, is about ushering humanity back onto a living planet. This is where we used to live. This is where the indigenous people of the world still live.

Sweden, for instance, has recently proposed a constitutional amendment giving nature the right to "exist, flourish, regenerate and evolve." And tribespeople and municipalities all across the planet are demanding that legal personhood be recognized for imperiled natural resources: the Klamath River in California; the River Frome in England; the Whanganui River in New Zealand; even Lake Erie (the Great Lake whose waves caressed my childhood), long poisoned by toxic agricultural runoff, which has spurred voters in Toledo, Ohio, to pass a Lake Erie Bill of Rights.

This is just a sampling of the demands being made for governmental acknowledgement of the need for environmental sanity, which, of course, is only part of the global climate movement. Indeed, it's more than just clenched fists and protests in the streets. These actions create specific and immediate changes, forcing the world's legal systems to broaden the contexts in which they function.

Yet the movement is also paradoxical almost to the point of absurdity: giving rivers, lakes, Mother Nature herself, the same sort of legal status that . . . corporations have?

This thrusts nature, as Margil writes, "into the murky realm of legal personhood." The prime strangeness about all this is the implicit assumption that "the law" in some way has conceptual dominion over Lake Erie or the Klamath River or Pachamama and can choose (or choose not) to give a particular ecosystem, which sustains life itself, the right to exist.

In no way do I mean this observation as a criticism of the movement itself. There is no simple course of action when you are trying to open a cage while you're locked inside of it. Demanding legal protection – legal credibility – for an ecosystem is both pragmatic in the short term and ingeniously subversive in the long term, because it yanks open both judicial and public awareness of the fact that maintaining a well-balanced, functioning global environment is a human responsibility, not to mention the only way we have a hope of surviving.

Excerpted from: 'The Rights Of Nature'.

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