Rights of Nature — An Ancient Principle for a Modern Crisis
The Indigenous teaching that rivers, mountains, forests, and animal nations have inherent rights — not as legal fictions but as genuine beings with standing and sovereignty — is now being encoded into the laws of an increasing number of nations and municipalities.
The Rights of Nature movement — which has resulted in constitutional recognition of nature's rights in Ecuador (2008) and Bolivia (2009), legal personhood for the Whanganui River in New Zealand (2017), and dozens of municipal ordinances in the United States — is a direct translation of Indigenous ecological philosophy into Western legal frameworks. The Te Awa Tupua Act in New Zealand, which grants the Whanganui River the legal rights of a person, uses the Indigenous Maori concept of the river as ancestor and person as its explicit philosophical foundation. In the United States, the Standing Rock fight, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe's Rights of Manoomin (wild rice), and numerous local ordinances represent the integration of Indigenous ecological personhood concepts into American law. What was once dismissed as 'primitive animism' is becoming the most legally innovative front of the environmental movement.
The river doesn't need our laws. We need to acknowledge its laws.
Legal scholars Christopher Stone (whose 1972 article Should Trees Have Standing? catalyzed the rights of nature movement) and Cormac Cullinan both document that Indigenous ecological personhood concepts provide the most coherent philosophical foundation for environmental law reform.
Anishinaabe oral tradition