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Rights of Nature


Rights of Nature is a tradition of legal and political scholarship advocating legal standing for the natural environment. The rights approach is a break away from traditional environmental regulatory systems, which regard nature as property and legalize and manage degradation of the environment rather than prevent it. Since 2000 animals, plants and other organisms have their rights to dignity recognised by the Constitution in Switzerland (art. 120), but the implications of this disposition are still not very clear. With the enactment of its 2008 Constitution, Ecuador became the first country in the world to codify the Rights of Nature and to inform a more clarified content to those rights. Articles 10 and 71–74 of the Ecuadorian Constitution recognize the inalienable rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish, gives people the authority to petition on the behalf of ecosystems, and requires the government to remedy violations of these rights.

In his famous work, "Should Trees Have Standing?", Christopher Stone presented the case for conferring legal personality and rights on the environment. As Stone explained, as a rights-holder the natural object would “have a legally recognised worth and dignity in its own right, and not merely to serve as a means to benefit ‘us’”. To achieve rights-holder status, the natural object must satisfy three criteria: [First], that the thing can institute legal actions at its behest; second, that in determining the granting of legal relief, the court must take injury to it into account; and third, that relief must run to the benefit of it.

In his dissenting opinion in the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), Justice William O. Douglas argued that "inanimate objects" should have standing to sue in court:

The critical question of "standing" would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we fashioned a federal rule that allowed environmental issues to be litigated before federal agencies or federal courts in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers and where injury is the subject of public outrage. Contemporary public concern for protecting nature's ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation. This suit would therefore be more properly labeled as Mineral King v. Morton.

Douglas continued:

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole—a creature of ecclesiastical law—is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases.... So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.


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