Before nature gets its rights, it needs advocates

In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court issued a landmark ruling that protected the untouched Los Cedros Forest, a biodiverse cloud forest in the Andes, from destruction. The court invoked the pioneering recognition of the rights of nature added to the 2008 constitution, which shifted from treating the environment as property to recognising Pacha Mama (Mother Nature) as a legal entity with inalienable rights to exist, persist, and regenerate its life cycles.  

The case concerned mining licenses that the government had granted to a Canadian company for exploratory work in the forest, which environmentalists warned would ultimately pollute the water and destroy Los Cedros’ fragile ecosystem. The court ruled that any environmental degradation was in clear violation of the constitution guaranteeing the right of nature and its species to regenerate. It then nullified the mining permits and ordered the mining company to pay for the harm to the forest it had already caused.  

The Los Cedros ruling was celebrated far beyond the Ecuadorean border. Legal scholars searching for creative ways to protect and restore the planet have wondered whether granting nature the same rights as humans would create iron-clad legal protection. The concept of nature rights is not without precedent. In 2017, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River. Bolivia enshrined the rights of Mother Earth into law in 2010, and in India the Ganges and Yamuna river systems were granted the legal status of personhood. But although a global movement is now underfoot to extend legal rights to nature, in the UK that movement faces an enormous legal hurdle: the country doesn’t have a constitution.  

Anthropomorphising nature sounds tempting when so much of it feels like it is dying. Speaking last week at The Conduit, Paul Powlesland, an environmental rights lawyer, shared a harrowing fact that there is not a single living plant in the Thames River between Greenwich and Battersea: “it’s just concrete and sheet piping.” The river was once a lively part of city life. Fish were caught and sold from the river, clothes were washed, and Londoners swam. Powlesland described the relationship modern Londoners have with the river as “completely artificial” where we “stand on the bank and look down at the river as if you’re at a cliff edge.”  

But the environmental rights barrister warns that the extension of legal personhood to nature won’t magically save our relationship with it unless we can also act as nature’s stewards.

For Powlesland, the problem is that the legal system is built on a faulty understanding that sees nature as a dead resource to be used and extracted for human ends without its own rights and interests. He explained that in Ecuador, the legal framework around rights of nature creates binary decisions where nature has the right to exist over being destroyed. That same binary cannot be applied in the UK, because here there is no pristine land.  

Powlesland raised the question: “If we just pass a law saying that nature has the right to exist, well what does that mean for the Thames?” The river does exist with or without sheet piping. Granting the river legal personhood wouldn’t necessarily protect it from the interests of corporations whose profits depend on its exploitation.  

The other crucial difference between places like Ecuador and New Zealand, and the UK, is that in Britain there is no indigenous population that can act as guardians of nature. These guardians advocate for nature rights because they perceive the land as inherently part of themselves. This sense of guardianship empowers the indigenous population to act on nature’s behalf. In Britain, centuries of industrialisation and capitalism have severed that bond we feel with our natural environment, thereby creating a passive mindset where we assume that protecting nature is the responsibility of amorphous ministries. The end result of this passivity is that companies like Thames Water can get away with pumping 72 billion litres of sewage into the River Thames in two years. 

Powlesland suggests a three-step process to recreating a sense of guardianship over nature. The first is getting to know a specific part of it. His own life is a rather extreme example of this first step – he lives on a boat on the River Roding. For the rest of us living on land, getting to know a specific part of nature well can be something as simple as spending time in a local park and contemplating its needs. 

The second step is to really engage with nature. “Swimmers, fishermen, canoeists are all the vanguard of river protection because they really get involved,” he said. The final step is what Powlesland calls care and sacrifice. “Those who have sacrificed themselves to care for a specific part of nature have a love and a bond for it that cannot be matched and cannot be equalled.”  

He provided a powerful example from his own work protecting the River Roding. After repeatedly asking the Environmental Agency to take action to protect it, Powlesland organised a group of volunteers earlier this year to remove litter and silt from the river’s banks. Together they removed 200 bags of rubbish. Instead of thanking him for his proactive efforts, the agency threatened him with prosecution for illegally intervening without a permit. Threat of arrest aside, the advantage of repeatedly cleaning a specific part of the river is that it makes the guardians even more impatient for national laws that will render their efforts unnecessary.  

“This is why guardianship is so important,” Powlesland argued. “Rights of nature in this country are not going to drop out of the sky. There are very powerful vested interests who will do whatever they can to block it. So this needs to be a rising grassroots movement, but one grounded in actual relationships of love and care to specific parts of nature.”  

Some positive examples are beginning to emerge. Last year Lewes District Council granted rights to the River Ouse in East Sussex. Emma Montlake, a director at Love Our Ouse, told the BBC that passing the motion was “very much a community-led process.” Councillors who voted for the motion said that granting the river rights will influence planning decisions and the climate action plans.  

Granting legal personhood to nature won’t solve all of the planet’s problems, but it does signal a legal reset in which nature is no longer seen as an open resource for exploitation. Powlesland concluded by insisting that passing national legislation is an uphill battle that can only happen if more people get involved at a local level to demand change.  

“Rights of nature is not just a legal thing, it is putting this idea into our legal, political, economic, social, religious systems into almost every aspect of our society,” said Powlesland.