Mother Jones – July-August 2019

JULY / AUGUST 2019 | MOTHER JONES 67

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Standing?” Stone, a University of Southern

California law professor, was one of the first

Western legal scholars to contemplate na-

ture’s ability to take part in lawsuits.

But just look at the American legal

system: Corporations and even ships

have rights. “We’re human beings. We

make laws,” says David Boyd, an associate

law professor at the University of British

Columbia and author of the 2017 book

The Rights of Nature. “We have the capac-

ity to recognize the rights of whomever and

whatever we want. It’s just a matter of de-

termining what’s important to us.”

At the very least, says Andrew Wetzler,

deputy chief program officer of the Natural

Resources Defense Council’s Nature Pro-

gram, the rights-of-nature movement could

inspire people to consider their surround-

ings in a new light. “Once you start seeing

something as being deserving of moral con-

sideration, you start to view the whole nat-

ural world differently, and you start to see

that nature isn’t simply created for people

to use,” he says, “and that’s a fundamental

shift in perspective.”

But is the United States ready for such an

overhaul of environmental laws? A day after

the Toledo amendment passed, a farmer sued

the city, alleging the lake’s bill of rights is un-

constitutional and exposes his farm to “mas-

sive liability.” In May, the judge overseeing

the case rejected Toledoans for Safe Water’s

motion to intervene in the suit on behalf of

the lake: “Some may believe the law should

confer legal standing upon natural objects

and features,” he wrote, “but a district court—

bound by Congress and higher courts—is not

the appropriate body to take that leap.”

A spokesperson for Toledoans for Safe

Water says the group plans to appeal the

decision. As many residents remember, the

fight for a clean Lake Erie was decades in the

making. In the late ’60s, the water became

so polluted by chemical waste and dead

fish, the media declared the lake had been

“killed.” The crisis helped spark passage of

the Clean Water Act. Toledo’s Markie Miller

thinks the battle over its bill of rights will

serve as a starting point for a new kind of

movement: “The people of Toledo won’t be

going away anytime soon,” she says. “Lake

Erie needs our protection.” n

ing waste sludge into nearby open-pit mines
by mandating that any resident could sue to
vindicate the “rights of natural communi-
ties and ecosystems.” Since then, more than
three dozen communities across the United
States have adopted similar measures. In
2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe,
a Native American nation in Minnesota,
codified the rights of manoomin, or wild
rice, to “flourish, regenerate, and evolve.”
As Casey Camp-Horinek, an environmen-
talist and matriarch of the Ponca Nation in
Oklahoma, points out, the rights-of-nature
movement “simply recognizes what the in-
digenous people have always been a part
of: the natural cycle of life belonging to all
living things, not just humans.”
Outside the United States, Ecuador wrote
the rights of nature into its constitution in

2008. In 2017, a court in India ruled that the
      Ganges and Yamuna rivers have the same
      legal standing as people (the ruling was
      later overturned). The Whanganui, New
      Zealand’s longest navigable river, has legal
      standing under a law passed that same year.
      Rights-of-nature laws often work by ap-
      pointing a guardian to advocate for a par-
      ticular ecosystem or natural feature, much
      like a parent represents a child’s interests
      in court. The guardian can sue on the eco-
      system’s behalf. If the ecosystem is awarded
      damages, the money might go into a trust
      dedicated to funding its restoration.
      Predictably, conservatives have ridi-
      culed the idea of entitling lakes and forests.
      In 2011, Fox News editor George Russell
      wrote that the movement aims to create
      a “radical regime of global environmental
      law.” Wesley Smith, a senior fellow at the
      right-wing Discovery Institute, warned in a
      2011 editorial that granting rights to nature
      would “open the courtroom doors to rad-
      ical environmentalist lawyers” who’d “fire
      a continual barrage of lawsuits seeking to
      uphold the rights of their animal and vege-
      table clients.” (In practice, rights-of-nature
      laws apply to entire ecosystems rather than
      a single mushroom or tree.)
      “Each time there is a movement to confer
      rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal
      is bound to sound odd or frightening or
      laughable,” noted Christopher Stone in
      his seminal 1972 essay, “Should Trees Have

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