The Rights of Nature Article 1

Granting legal rights and protections to non-human entities such as animals, trees and rivers etc., is essential if humanity is to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. The authors of a report titled ‘Law in the Emerging Bio Age’ say legal frameworks have a key part to play in governing human interactions with the environment and biotechnology.

 

Meanwhile the (report for the Law Society) explores how the links between humans and the Living Earth might be recalibrated in the future. A few, indeed too few countries have enshrined rights to make ecocide a prosecutable offence.

We sometimes see ourselves as outside nature indeed that nature is something that we can manipulate when actually we are part of nature.  We often see ourselves to be at the top of the evolutionary tree in some ways, if you look at it in that linear kind of way, but actually the global ecosystem is much more powerful than we are.

“We are not wise enough to attempt to control the natural world, but we can introduce some sort of framework for accountability and responsibility for the consequences of the things we do, and that’s where ecocide laws are so important .regarding the Living Earth.

If that worldview can be enshrined in law, essentially granting personhood rights to the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees or the spirit of the animals etc., you’re talking about enshrining the rights of the Living Earth into 21st-century legal frameworks.