User:Draftpage/sandbox

[alternative: Rights of nature is a legal theory that aims to shift nature from being considered a resource to be owned and exploited by humans, to a co-equal legal subject to humans with its own rights.]

Rights of nature is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. It is characterized as more consistent with modern, system-based science and evolving ethics, and so better able to address environmental challenges.

The rights of nature challenges 20th century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as “resource,” to be owned, used, and degraded. Proponents argue that laws grounded in nature’s rights better allow natural systems and species to thrive as a partner with human life on a shared planet.

Nature’s rights laws exist at the local to national levels in 12 countries, including an estimated 50 cities and counties across 13 U.S. states (as of mid-2019), in the form of constitutional provisions, treaty agreements, statutes, local ordinances, and court decisions.

Basic tenets
With the steady expansion of the recognition of human rights and associated duties over time, and the adoption of the 1948 the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is contended that rights and duties should continue to expand to recognize the rights of nature. Support for this contention arises in two general way: first, it is argued that if inherent human rights arise from existence, so too logically do inherent rights of the natural world arise from its own existence. This support for nature’s rights in law is underpinned by “Earth jurisprudence,” a philosophy and ethics of law which recognizes that the earth’s laws as primary, and that everything by the fact of its existence has an intrinsic right to be, to habitat and to evolve. Laws based on a recognition of the intrinsic moral value of the natural world arguably would better steer human behavior towards well-being for all.

Second, it is contended that humans can only thrive in the long term by realizing the fact of humans’ integrated co-existence with the natural world. That is, from a utilitarian perspective, by rejecting nature’s rights and degrading nature, humans also harming their own self-interest.

The rights of nature movement is working to shift from a frame of nature as resource to nature as partner, toward a mutually thriving relationship with Earth’s ecosystems and species. As legal scholar Christopher Stone wrote, recognition of rights in the rightless always appears incredible at the start, as past movements for fundamental human rights have demonstrated. Nonetheless, human rights have increasingly been “found” over time and declared “self-evident,” even where essentially non-existent in the law. The success of past and current human rights movements provides lessons for the current effort to widen the circle of Earth community to include natural systems and species populations as rights-bearing entities.

Critique of the anthropocentric legal systems
Proponents of the rights of nature legal framework contend that existing anthropocentric legal and economic systems consider nature as fundamentally property, which can be degraded for profit and human desire. The “nature as resource” frame results in an ongoing reduction of environmental well-being, particularly if economic interests are threatened. While environmental laws do afford some level of protection to ecosystems and species, it is argued that such protections fail to stop, let alone reverse, overall environmental decline, because nature is by definition subordinated to economic interests.

Rights of nature proponents contend that re-envisioning current environmental laws from a nature’s rights frame demonstrates the limitations of current legal systems. As one example, the U.S. Endangered Species Act prioritizes protection of existing economic interests by activating only when species populations are headed toward extinction. By contrast, a “Healthy Species Act” would prioritize achievement of thriving species populations, and facilitate economic systems that drive species conservation. As another example, the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) calls for examination of the environmental impacts of select development projects. However, NEPA fails to require restoration even where needed, or mandate more broad reversal of damage done to ecosystems and species. A legal system grounded in a nature’s rights frame would be more likely to include an affirmative societal duty to give back more than what was taken such as through widescale restoration, thereby better ensuring that a healthy environment overall remains within reach.

Underlying schools of thought
Modern environmental laws arose in the 1960s and early 1970s out of a foundational perspective of the environment as broken up by sectors. Air, water, mammals, fish, forests, and other elements of the natural world were to be managed separately, such as through the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and numerous other laws. Some, such as the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act, called for broader review of proposed development projects, but stopped short of mandatory controls to ensure ecosystem and species health.

These laws reflected the science of the time, which was still developing a system-based understanding of the natural world and humans’ place in it. The first major textbook on ecological science, which described the natural world as a system rather than a collection of different parts, was not written until 1983.

Though science has since shifted to a modern, system-based focus that reflects the deep interconnectedness of natural systems, including human populations as part of those systems, environmental laws generally have not evolved with this shift. Rights of nature proponents contend that a legal frame consistent with current science would recognize the earth’s laws as primary. Cultural historian and Earth geologian Thomas Berry writes that society’s laws should derive from the laws of nature to effectively shift destructive behavior. He offers an “Earth Jurisprudence” philosophy and ethics of law that concludes that ecosystems and species have an intrinsic right to be, to habitat, and to evolve. As Berry explains, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” From this perspective, because all life arose from the context of the universe, it is flawed to view humans as the only subjects, with all other beings merely a collection of objects to be owned and used. Consideration of life as a web of relationships extending back to a shared ancestry confers subject status to all, along with inherent rights arising from that status.

Laws based on a recognition of the intrinsic moral value of the natural world reflect these fundamental relationships, and create a new societal moral compass, one that directs society’s interactions with the natural world more effectively towards well-being for all.

Expansion of rights consistent with changing societal ethics has been observed and reinforced by leading scientists. Charles Darwin observed that human moral development has involved a continual extension of “social instincts and sympathies.” From the abolition of slavery, to the granting to women of the right to vote, to the civil rights movement, to gay marriage, society continues to expand rights with expanded understanding of inherent moral worth. This expansion is now extending to the natural world.

Aldo Leopold linked this expansion to the natural world, writing that, “[w]hen we see land as a community to which we belong,” rather than “a commodity belonging to us,” we can then “begin to use it with love and respect.” Leopold adds the implementation guidance, stating that a “thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” As society has done before, it again can widen the circle of community to include all life as subjects, and worthy of care.

The outgrowth of such scientific and ethical advances is a proposed new frame for legal and governance systems, grounded in an ethic and a language that better guide individual and societal behavior away from destructive ecological and related social practices that ignore human-nature interconnections. Rather than a vision of merely “sustainable development,” which is grounded in a frame of nature maintained as economic feedstock, society could seek a goal of “thriving communities,” where “communities” includes nature as a full subject, rather than simply an object to be used.

Related concepts and movements
(spell out similarities and distinctions between RoN and other concepts such as Ecocide, Wild law, Earth jurisprudence, Animal rights...?)

History
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The drafters affirmed that the “supreme value of the human person” does “not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but…in the fact of existing.” Recognition of fundamental rights in such “soft law” instruments is not merely a formality. Nations around the world have developed statutes, court decisions, regulations, and other bodies of law out of the UDHR that reflect and implement the human rights it champions.

Decades later, USC Professor Christopher Stone called for recognition of the rights of the natural world as well, recognizing that the logic of “rights derived from existence” also applies to nature. He outlined the elements of nature’s participation in human legal systems, describing such a legal system as necessarily including: recognition of injuries as subject to redress by public body, standing to institute legal actions (with guardians acting on behalf of the natural entity), redress calculated for natural entity’s own damages, and relief running to the benefit of the injured natural entity.

In addition to Stone’s legal work, other key drivers of the rights of nature movement include indigenous perspectives and the work of indigenous rights movement (particularly in South America), the writings of Arne Naess and the Deep ecology movement, Thomas Berry’s 2001 jurisprudential call for recognizing the laws of nature as the primary text, the publication of Wild Law in 2003  and subsequent creation of Wild Law UK, adoption by U.S. communities of laws addressing rights of nature,  and mounting global concern with species losses, ecosystem destruction, and the existential threat of climate change. These and other factors, including the creation of the Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature in 2010, supported the development of the 2010 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME). The UDRME was adopted by representatives of 130 nations at the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, convened in Bolivia in response to the disappointment of many over the results of the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations.

Just as the U.N. recognized human rights as arising from in existence, so too does the UDRME find that the “inherent rights of Mother Earth are inalienable in that they arise from the same source as existence.” The UDRME has since been formally presented to the United Nations, and may serve as a model for other international and national efforts, such as the proposal by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature.

Each new legal and jurisprudential advancement calls for research, assessment, and evaluation, and rights of nature scholars similarly have taken up this task. Researchers, governments, courts, communities, and advocates have been advancing new legal systems and conceptions of law that acknowledge humans and natural systems as intimately interconnected. These proposed legal systems recognize ecosystems and species populations as rights-bearing community subjects, and guide human behavior accordingly.

Rights of nature law
Law in the form of constitutional provisions, treaty agreements,  national  and subnational  statutes, local ordinances and city charters,  and court decisions  now exists in 12 countries, five U.S. Tribal Nations, and an estimated 50 cities and counties across 13 U.S. states. Examples are discussed in more detail below.

New Zealand
Legal standing for natural systems in New Zealand arose alongside new attention paid to long-ignored treaty agreements with the indigenous Maori. In August 2012, a treaty agreement signed with the Maori iwi recognized the Whanganui River and tributaries as legal entity, an “integrated, living whole” with its own standing. The national Te Awa Tupua Act was enacted in March 2017 to further formalize this status. In 2013, the Te Urewera Forest treaty agreement similarly recognized the legal personhood of the Forest, with the Te Urewera Act signed into law in 2014 to formalize this status. More recently, a new treaty agreement with the Maori was signed in December 2017 to recognize Mount Taranaki as “a legal personality, in its own right.”

Each of these developments advanced the indigenous principle that the ecosystems are living, spiritual beings with intrinsic value, incapable of being owned in an absolute sense.

Ecuador
In 2008, the people of Ecuador amended their Constitution to recognize the inherent rights of nature. Among other provisions, Article 71 states that “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain itself and regenerate its own vital cycles, structure, functions and its evolutionary processes.” The Article adds enforcement language as well, stating that “Any person…may demand the observance of the rights of the natural environment before public bodies….” Mirroring Stone, Article 72 adds that “Nature has the right to be completely restored…independent of the obligation … to compensate people….” Detailed studies have been made of the constitutional provisions’ broad application in Ecuador to date.

Ecuador
A significant body of case law has been expanding in Ecuador to implement the nation’s constitutional provisions regarding the rights of nature. Examples include lawsuits in the following areas:


 * Biodigestors (2009): The court identified potential nature’s rights violation even though citizen plaintiffs had not raised them. It found that its role was to enforce rights of “all parties” to the case – including nature, as dictated by the Constitution.
 * Vilcabamba River (2011): The court held that the Vilcabamba River’s inherent right to flow had been violated by debris dumping, and it ordered restoration.
 * Hydropower (2019): The nation’s Constitutional Court, which holds power to select cases relevant to the protection of constitutional rights, chose to take up a hydropower case that raised rights of nature claims. The court’s decision should be released by the end of 2019.

Colombia
Unlike the situation in Ecuador, there are no Colombian statutes or constitutional provisions addressing nature’s rights. However, this has not prevented Colombian courts from finding such rights as inherent.

For example, in a 2016 case brought by NGOs and indigenous groups over the severely polluted Atrato River, the Colombia Constitutional Court ordered the river’s cleanup, finding that Nature is a “true subject of rights that must be recognized by states and exercised … for example, by the communities that inhabit it or have a special relationship with it.” The Court added that humans are “only one more event within a long evolutionary chain [and] in no way…owner of other species, biodiversity or natural resources, or the fate of the planet.”

In 2018, the Colombia Supreme Court took up a climate change case by a group of children and young adults that also raised fundamental rights issues. In addition to making legal findings related to human rights, the Court found that the Colombian Amazon is a “‘subject of rights’, entitled to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration.” It recognized the special role of Amazon deforestation in creating greenhouse gas emissions in Colombia, and as a remedy ordered the nation and its administrative agencies to ensure a halt to all deforestation by 2020. The Court further allocated enforcement power to the plaintiffs and affected communities, requiring the agencies to report to the communities and empowering them to inform the Court if the agencies were not meeting their deforestation targets.

India
As in Colombia, no statutes or constitutional provisions in India specifically identify rights of nature. Nevertheless, the India Supreme Court in 2012 set the stage for cases to come on rights of nature, finding that “Environmental justice could be achieved only if we drift away from the principle of anthropocentric to ecocentric. . . humans are part of nature and non-human has intrinsic value.”

The Uttarakhand High Court applied the principle of ecocentric law in 2017, recognizing the legal rights of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and ecosystems, and calling them “living human entities” and juridical and moral persons. The Court quickly followed with similar judgments for the rivers’ associated glaciers, including the Gangotri and Yamunotri, and other natural systems. While the India Supreme Court stayed the Ganga and Yamuna judgment at request of local authorities, those authorities support the proposed legal status in concept but are seeking implementation guidance.

United States
At the community level, ordinances are being passed throughout the United States recognizing the inherent rights of ecosystems to exist, thrive and evolve. An estimated 50 ordinances with rights of nature provisions have been passed to date across 13 U.S. states. Almost all were passed in reaction to a specific threat to local well-being, such as threats posed by hydrofracking, groundwater extraction, gravel mining, and fossil fuel extraction. For example, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania passed an anti-fracking law that includes the following provision to buttress protections: “Natural communities and ecosystems …possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist and flourish.” The ordinance addresses enforcement, stating that “Residents … shall possess legal standing to enforce those rights.”

By contrast, residents in Santa Monica, California proactively sought to recognize nature’s rights in local law after the U.S. Supreme Court’s expansion of corporate rights in Citizens United. The Santa Monica City Council adopted in 2013 a “Sustainability Rights Ordinance,” recognizing the “fundamental and inalienable rights” of “natural communities and ecosystems” in the City to “exist and flourish.” The Ordinance emphasizes that “[c]orporate entities…do not enjoy special privileges or powers under the law that subordinate the community's rights to their private interests.” It specifically defines “natural communities and ecosystems” to include “groundwater aquifers, atmospheric systems, marine waters, and native species.”

Santa Monica updated its Sustainable City Plan in 2014 to reinforce its codified commitment to nature’s rights. In 2018, the City Council adopted a Sustainable Groundwater Management Ordinance that specifically referenced the inherent rights of the local aquifer to flourish.

Further progress on the Sustainability Rights Ordinance is being mapped by Santa Monica’s Task Force on the Environment. In early 2019, the Task Force formally recommended that the City adopt, into both the Sustainability Rights Ordinance and the Sustainable City Plan, a mandate of “sustainable rights ordinance consistency determination[s] for all projects, policies, and ordinances that meet a certain threshold as determine by Council.”

Other
State, regional and local laws have been arising in other nations around the world as well, including:
 * Argentina: City of Santa Fé (2015)
 * Brazil: Municipality of Paudalho (2018), Municipality of Bonito, (2017)
 * France: Loyalty Islands Province, New Caledonia (2016)
 * Mexico: Mexico City Constitution (2017), Constitution of the State of Guerrero (2014), State of Colima (Congressional approval of an amendment to the state constitution) (2019)

United Nations
“Soft law” advancements at the international level have precipitated broader discussions about the potential for integrating nature’s rights into legal systems. The United Nations has held nine “Harmony with Nature” General Assembly Dialogues to date on Earth-centered governance systems and philosophies (“Earth Jurisprudence”), which included discussion of rights of nature specifically. The companion U.N. Harmony with Nature Initiative compiles rights of nature laws globally and offers a U.N. “Knowledge Network”  of Earth Jurisprudence practitioners across disciplines.

These U.N. Dialogues and Harmony with Nature Initiative are focusing discussion around development of a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature which, like the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, could form the foundation for rights-based laws worldwide. One model for such a Declaration could be the 2010 UDRME, which itself was developed based on the UDHR.

IUCN
The IUCN – the only international observer organization in the U.N. General Assembly with expertise in the environment – adopted in 2012 a Resolution specifically calling for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Nature. The IUCN reaffirmed its commitment to nature’s rights at its next meeting in 2016, where the body voted to build rights of nature implementation into the upcoming, four-year IUCN Workplan. Further, the recent “IUCN World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law” identifies in its Principle 2 that “Nature has the inherent right to exist, thrive, and evolve.” Discussion will continue at the IUCN’s next Quadrennial Meeting, to be held in 2020 in Marseille, France.

Ongoing initiatives
Incorporation of nature’s rights into law has occurred within a system-changing movement for rights. Various initiatives have shaped and continue to guide this movement, including: efforts to develop jurisprudential theory; ongoing litigation to implement nature’s rights laws;  development and implementation of new economics models that reflect nature’s rights;  indigenous leadership to inform understanding of nature’s rights;  creation of partnerships with international social movements (such as the right to water),  university education of the next generation of lawyers, decisionmakers, and advocates;  development of economic and financial systems reflect nature’s rights laws; advancement of practical solutions consistent with a nature’s rights frame (such as rewilding);  drafting of model standards, criteria, and guidance grounded in nature’s right to exist, thrive, and evolve;  and movement capacity building, including through development of regional hubs of action globally.

International Rights of Nature Tribunals have been and continue to be coordinated by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, to illustrate implementation of nature’s rights laws. The Tribunals bring together rights of nature, human rights, and rights of indigenous peoples advocates in a process similar to the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunals,  with the goal of giving formal public recognition, visibility and voice to the people and natural systems injured by alleged violations of fundamental rights and marginalized in current law.

Notable documents

 * Republic of Ecuador, Constitution 2008, Ch. 7; http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html
 * Plurinational State of Bolivia, Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, Law No. 071 2010; www.harmonywithnatureun.org/content/documents/158Bolivia%20Ley%20071.pdf
 * Constitutional Court of the Republic of Colombia, Judgment in Case T-622 of 2016, Proceeding T-5.016.242, (2016); http://cr00.epimg.net/descargables/2017/05/02/14037e7b5712106cd88b687525dfeb4b.pdf
 * Supreme Court of the Republic of Colombia, Judgement in Case STC-4360-2018, Filing no. 11001-22-03-000-2018-00319-01 (2018); see also https://www.dejusticia.org/en/climate-change-and-future-generations-lawsuit-in-colombia-key-excerpts-from-the-supreme-courts-decision/
 * T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad Vs. Union of India & Others (2012); https://indiankanoon.org/doc/187293069/
 * Judgment by High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal regarding Writ Petition (PIL) No. 126 of 2014 (2017); www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/58002817/writ-petition-pil-no126-of-2014
 * Judgment by High Court of Uttarakhand at Naintal regarding Writ Petition (PIL) No. 140 of 2015 (2017); http://files.harmonywithnatureun.org/uploads/upload662.pdf
 * New Zealand, Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act (2017)
 * New Zealand, Te Urewera Act (2014)
 * New Zealand Office of Treaty Settlements, “Deed of Settlement Between the Crown and Tuhoe” (2013); http://nz01.terabyte.co.nz/ots/DocumentLibrary/TuhoeSettlementSummary.pdf
 * New Zealand, Tūtohu Whakatupua (2012); http://www.wrmtb.co.nz/new_updates/TuutohuWhakatupuaFinalSigned.pdf
 * Constitution of Mexico City (2017); http://cdmx.gob.mx/storage/app/uploads/public/589/746/ef5/589746ef5f8cc447475176.pdf
 * City of Pittsburgh, PA, Municipal Code, Title 6, Art 1, Ch. 618, “Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Drilling Ordinance’” (2010); [broken link]
 * An Ordinance of the City Council of the City of Santa Monica Establishing Sustainability Rights, Santa Monica Municipal Code, Art. 4, Ch. 4.75, (April 9, 2013); https://www.qcode.us/codes/santamonica/
 * Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, http://pwccc.wordpress.com/programa/
 * IUCN, Resolution 100, “Incorporation of the Rights of Nature as the organizational focal point in IUCN’s decision making” (Jeju, South Korea 2012); https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/44067