20 | New Scientist | 28 September 2019
COURTS in Ohio are wrestling with
an unusual question: how do you
weigh up the rights of two people
when one of them is a lake?
For several years, Lake Erie has
been hit by an annual bloom of
toxic algae caused by run-off from
surrounding farmland. In some
years, the contamination is so bad
local people are warned against
drinking water from their taps.
Existing environmental
protections clearly weren’t
working. So residents of Toledo, a
city at the western end of the lake,
took drastic action earlier this year
and voted to protect Lake Erie as
if it were a person. The legislation
gives the lake the right to “exist,
flourish and naturally evolve”.
But farmers were quick to
challenge the law.
Giving nature rights is a strategy
for protecting the environment
that is building steam. Rivers
in nations including India and
New Zealand now have such
rights. In July, Bangladesh became
the first country to grant all its
rivers – some 700 in total – legal
personhood. It may sound like a
strange tactic, but could it also be
an effective one?
The principle of human rights
emerged during the 18th century,
the idea being that certain
fundamental things are allowed
of people or owed to them.
The 1776 American Declaration
of Independence, for example,
established a person’s right to
life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
The case for extending legal
rights to the environment was
first made by University of
Southern California law professor
Christopher Stone in 1972. But
other ways of protecting the
environment became more
mainstream. Many nations have
laws that make it illegal to dump
pollution. There are also manyConservationHINDUST
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Rights of nature
Is giving a lake, mountain or forest legal personhood a clever way
to protect the environment? Douglas Heaven investigatesThe Whanganui river in
New Zealand (above)
has been declared a
legal person. So too
has the Yamuna in
India (below), which
remains polluted with
rotting flowers, cloth
and other rubbishareas, such as national parks,
where human activities that
could damage the environment
are tightly regulated.
This may not be enough. In May,
a major UN report concluded that
environmental destruction is
so bad that it threatens human
existence. “There is a sense that
the current way of responding
to the environmental crisis isn’t
working,” says Maria Lee at
University College London.
Frustration seems to be what
fuelled the legal move related to
Lake Erie. “With each step the
people took in the traditional legal
framework, they realised they
needed to try a different approach,”
says Tish O’Dell at the Community
Environmental Legal Defense
Fund, a non-profit law firm that
helped Toledo draft its law.
Many other stretches of water
around the world have been given
rights in the past few years (see
“Water power”, right). The strategy
could work for other aspects ofnature too. Laws in Bolivia and
Ecuador offer blanket protection
rights to the countries’
ecosystems. New Zealand is also
working towards giving forests
and a mountain similar rights to
those it has already bestowed on
the Whanganui river.
There is reason to think the
strategy will be helpful. The
introduction of human rights
proved not to be empty words: the
shift in thinking helped abolish
slavery by providing a vocabulary
for arguing the practice was
wrong, says Guillaume Chapron
at the Swedish University of
Agricultural Sciences.
And although it might seem
strange to give rights to inanimate
objects, we have already done that
on a huge scale. Companies, trade
unions and nations all have legal
rights. “The organisations that
will be challenging the legal status
of rivers have not necessarily got
any more reason to exist as a
legal entity than a river does,”