Rights of Nature

Rights of nature is a legal and philosophical movement that treats natural entities — rivers, forests, ecosystems, “Mother Earth” — as holders of legal rights rather than mere property or resources. Its core claim: nature has intrinsic worth, and the law should let it (through human guardians) appear in court, have injury to it weighed in decisions, and receive relief for its own restoration.

The intellectual foundation is Christopher Stone’s 1972 law review article “Should Trees Have Standing?” (see should-trees-have-standing). The movement became law in the 2000s–2010s through Ecuador’s 2008 constitution, Bolivia’s Law 071 (2010), and New Zealand’s treaty settlements granting legal personhood to Te Urewera (2014) and the Whanganui River (2017).

The problem it answers: representing “people who are not people”

Modern decision-making systematically under-represents entities whose interests humans depend on but which cannot speak for themselves: ecosystems, species, future generations, communities. Stone showed that at common law a polluted stream is “fundamentally rightless” — only a human riparian owner can sue, courts balance only the economic interests of identifiable humans, and any damages go to plaintiffs rather than to restoring the stream itself.¹

Stone’s three criteria for being a genuine holder of legal rights: (1) the entity can institute legal actions at its behest; (2) courts must take injury to it into account in granting relief; (3) relief must run to its benefit.²

The corporate-personhood analogy

Rights of nature borrows a well-worn legal technology: the artificial person. Corporations, states, estates, infants, and incompetents all “cannot speak,” yet lawyers speak for them through trustees, guardians, and representatives. Stone proposed the same guardianship machinery used for incompetent humans: when a “friend” of a natural object perceives it endangered, a court appoints a guardian to represent it.³

Crucially, legal personhood ≠ human personhood. Corporations have free-speech rights but cannot vote or plead the Fifth Amendment; rights are allocated à la carte to each class of person. Granting a river rights does not mean granting it every human right.

But the analogy has limits. A corporation is made of humans contractually bound in a delineated scope; an ecosystem is a gestalt entity with fuzzy boundaries, nested sub-entities whose interests conflict, and humans as constituent parts. Declaring a parcel of land a “person” side-steps precisely the hard questions — how to weigh multiple layers of interests within and around the entity — that the framework was meant to engage.

Landmark implementations

Ecuador — 2008 Constitution (Articles 71–74)

The first national constitution to grant rights to nature, framing it as Pacha Mama. Key provisions:⁴

• Art. 71: Nature “has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” Critically, any person, community, people, or nation can call on public authorities to enforce the rights of nature — universal standing.
• Art. 72: Nature has the right to be restored, independent of compensation owed to affected humans — directly answering Stone’s third criterion (relief running to the natural object itself).
• Art. 73: The state must apply preventive/restrictive measures against species extinction, ecosystem destruction, and permanent alteration of natural cycles.
• Art. 74: Environmental services cannot be appropriated.

Bolivia — Law 071, Law of the Rights of Mother Earth (2010)

Statutory enumeration of seven rights of Madre Tierra: to life; to diversity of life (no genetic alteration threatening existence or future potential); to water; to clean air; to equilibrium (maintenance/restoration of interrelation and interdependence of components); to restoration; and to live free of contamination.⁵ Framed in terms of state obligations and societal duties rather than courtroom standing.

New Zealand — treaty-settlement personhood

• Te Urewera Act 2014: the former national park declared “a legal entity” with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person,” exercised by the Te Urewera Board (Tūhoe–Crown co-governance). Land made inalienable.
• Te Awa Tupua Act 2017: the Whanganui River declared legal person Te Awa Tupua, represented by Te Pou Tupua — two guardians, one nominated by iwi, one by the Crown, holding “a singular duty to act in the interests of Te Awa Tupua.”

The NZ model is distinctive: personhood emerged from Treaty of Waitangi settlements, encoding the Māori view of the river/land as a living ancestor into statute, with co-governance built into the guardianship structure.

Open problems

• Boundary problem. Legal personality attaches to a human-demarcated area (a park boundary), but ecological reality rarely matches it — the health of what’s inside the boundary is tied to the larger system outside it. A river (a connected, flowing whole) is arguably a better candidate than a fenced park.
• Nested and conflicting interests. Ecosystems are made of other entities — predators and prey, humans living inside them — whose interests do not always align. Personhood statutes typically vest one board with the whole entity’s voice, papering over these layers.
• Guardian incentive problem. Who speaks for nature, and what keeps guardians faithful? Stone acknowledged the Department of the Interior was conceived as a guardian for public lands yet routinely balances nature against other missions — an independent guardian with a singular duty (like Te Pou Tupua) is the movement’s answer.
• Enforcement depth. Ecuador’s constitutional rights have produced court wins (e.g., cases enforcing river rights against mining and road projects) but inconsistent application; the gap between rights on paper and institutional capacity is the movement’s central empirical question.

Norm-theoretic reading

From the norms perspective, rights of nature is an attempt to shift the moral perimeter — extending the class of entities that “count” — using law as the enforcement backbone that informal norms lack. Stone opened his essay with Darwin’s observation that moral development is “a continual extension in the objects of his ‘social instincts and sympathies.’” Like metanorms stabilizing a norm by punishing non-punishers, universal-standing provisions (Ecuador Art. 71) recruit every citizen as a potential enforcer, lowering the cost of enforcement that dooms purely informal environmental norms.

See Also

• environmental-land-use-regulation-esa

• should-trees-have-standing

• te-urewera-act-2014

• te-awa-tupua-act-2017

• intergenerational-equity-litigation

• norms

• cooperation-and-defection

Sources

• christopher-d.-stone-should-trees-have-standing_%e2%80%94toward-legal-rights-for-natural-objects-45-s.-cal.-l.-rev.-450-1972..pdf
• 2008
• Ley N° 071 — Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (21 December 2010)
• Te Urewera Act 2014 — Key Provisions
• Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017

Footnotes

1. christopher-d.-stone-should-trees-have-standing_%e2%80%94toward-legal-rights-for-natural-objects-45-s.-cal.-l.-rev.-450-1972..pdf ↩

2. christopher-d.-stone-should-trees-have-standing_%e2%80%94toward-legal-rights-for-natural-objects-45-s.-cal.-l.-rev.-450-1972..pdf ↩

3. christopher-d.-stone-should-trees-have-standing_%e2%80%94toward-legal-rights-for-natural-objects-45-s.-cal.-l.-rev.-450-1972..pdf ↩

4. 2008 ↩

5. Ley N° 071 — Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (21 December 2010) ↩