Rights of Nature

Reflecting Nature's Rights in Law

Modern-day environmental laws rose up out of the ashes of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River fires, the devastating Santa Barbara oil spill, growing DDT poisoning of birds and wildlife, and other acts of desecration of the natural world.  Despite some notable success stories over the years, grave challenges such as climate change, over-diversion of waterways, and disappearing species remain.  This is in large part because our overarching legal system treats the natural world as property that can be exploited and degraded, rather than as an integral ecological partner with its own rights to exist and thrive.

The environment is increasingly registering its objections to this legal mismatch.  Climate change is the most direct protest, but the signs are all around us.  For example, decades of damming and pumping as much fresh water from California waterways as we could and pouring back contaminated wastewater have pushed the Bay-Delta Estuary and its fish and wildlife to near collapse.  The reaction by some of the state’s most eminent scholars?  To criticize the Endangered Species Act  (ESA) for getting in the way of further human manipulation of the waterways, and to denigrate ESA’s lack of a “provision for allowing species to go extinct.”  This stark reaction illustrates the inevitable endpoint of our laws – as water is over-allocated and other members of the natural world disappear, there will be a scramble for what is left, to the detriment of all.  This does not have to happen.  By creating a legal system that acknowledges and respects the rights of ecosystems to exist and thrive, we will prompt planning and actions that ensure that we truly live sustainably, for our own benefit and the benefit of the natural world that sustains us. 

CCKA is Taking Action

The false ideology of “humans over nature” needs to shift to recognize our interconnectedness and to grant appropriate rights to the natural world to exist and thrive.  Fortunately, models are cropping up for legal systems that can steer us in the right direction.  For example, along with ordinances in numerous U.S. towns and cities, the Ecuadorian Constitution at Articles 71 and 72 endows the environment with inalienable rights to "exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution."  The Constitution further grants individuals the legal authority to defend these rights on behalf of the environment.  Ecuadorians have taken the lead in reflecting science in constitutional law by acknowledging the interdependence between humans and our environment, and respecting both sides of that tightly-knit relationship. This effort led to the adoption, led by Bolivia, of a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which was formally presented to the United Nations in an April 2011 General Assembly event.

CCKA is working to implement such strategies in California by ensuring that the state's waterways enjoy rights to clean, adequate flows.  For example, CCKA recently provided written comments to the Delta Stewardship Council regarding the need to grant legal water rights to rivers to ensure the Delta and its fish populations receive the flows necessary for their health.  In several sets of detailed comments to the state’s Little Hoover Commission on water governance and to a Legislative oversight committees on water rights, CCKA similarly outlined the need for legal water rights for rivers and fish, to be safeguarded and enforced by independent, appointed guardians, in order to ensure that the necessary flows actually appeared.  Allocation of these legal water rights will cement in law the need for California to plan and act to develop low-energy, sustainable water supplies that will serve the state through the coming decades, particularly in the face of climate change impacts on the state’s water supplies.  CCKA will continue in 2011 to advance the need to allocate water rights for ecosystems, paired with water supply solutions that protect the water future of Californians and our environment.