This article by Sandra Cordon appeared in Landscape News on April 22, 2019.
From New Zealand, where a major river has been given legal status, to Ecuador, where nature’s rights are enshrined in the constitution, to India and the U.S., the global movement to recognize Mother Nature’s rights is picking up speed – and raising challenging issues, says a new academic paper.
“A rights revolution for nature” suggests that as the rights-of-nature movement scores some significant successes, it could help to address the worsening global environmental crisis, which current enviro-protection laws alone have not been able to reverse. The paper’s conclusions, published online in the journal Science, come as the world marks Earth Day on 22 April.
But for real change to occur, a profound shift in human attitudes is essential – a shift away from seeing nature merely as something that exists for people to exploit, says Guillaume Chapron, one of three authors of the paper and associate professor of ecology at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.
“Nature has the right to exist; nature is not just here to serve people,” explains Chapron. “I don’t believe we can solve our environmental problems by keeping the same mindset that caused the problem.”
Acknowledging nature’s fundamental rights of existence can offer greater environmental protection than “existing laws [that] regulate, rather than stop, the destruction of the natural world,” states the paper. That’s because nature’s basic rights – unlike many environmental protection laws – cannot be taken away, adds Chapron.
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