Published January 20, 2022 by Paul Powlesland on the blog, Lawyers for Nature.

A vital role for all lawyers: protecting the planet and bringing about the Rights of Nature through the creation – and enforcement – of an ecosystem of legal interventions at the international and local level.

The Bar prides itself on the fact that it has helped to spread the rule of law and notions of justice around the world. Members of the Bar were crucial in seeding notions of the rule of law, freedom of speech and other fundamental rights into legal systems and constitutions around the world, most notably in the US.

However, the Bar also had a significant role in establishing a far more insidious idea and, through British colonialism, spreading it around the world. This is the idea of nature as mere property, a dead resource from which humans are separated and which can be used however we see fit.

Of all illustrious barristers, few are as revered as William Blackstone, author of the Commentaries that became the foundation of English legal education. Blackstone’s ideas and principles became some of the fundamental features of English common law and thus also of the many countries around the world that have based their laws and legal system on ours.

Blackstone gave the justification for private property rights as:

‘In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man “dominion over all the earth, and over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” … The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.’

This idea, translated to the modern age, means that we now live in a legal system where an entirely fictional entity that you can create online for £12 in less than an hour has more legal rights and standing than living organisms which pre-date our entire civilisation (sometimes by thousands of years) and which we fundamentally rely on for life…

Read the full article HERE.

Photo credit:  Hidayat Abisena on Unsplash