User:StellaCS/Environmental personhood

Environmental Personhood
Because environmental entities such as rivers and plants can not represent themselves in court, a “guardian” can act on the entity's behalf to protect it.

Background
Although there is no federal law in the United States implementing environmental personhood, the idea has been advocated for by a US Supreme Court Justice. In the decision of the 1972 US Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton, Justice William Douglas wrote a dissenting opinion arguing that certain “environmental elements” should have locus standi, and that people with a meaningful relationship to that environmental element should be able to act on its behalf for its protection.

The Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, brought this suit against then Secretary of the Interior of the United States, Roger C. B. Morton stating that the federal government, according to the Administrative Procedure Act, could not grant permits for developers to build infrastructure––specifically a highway, powerlines, and a ski resort–– in the Mineral King Valley, part of the Sequoia National Forest. The Sierra Club aimed to protect this undeveloped land within the national forest, but the The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had stated that because the members of the Sierra Club would not be directly affected they could not sue under the Administrative Procedure Act, which “provides standards for judicial review” for instances where a person is negatively impacted by an agency action, such as granting a permit. The Supreme Court agreed that the Sierra Club could not sue under the Administrative Procedure Act, as it could not show that the actions of the defendant caused or would cause injury to its members. This ruling led Supreme Court Justice William Douglas to write his dissenting opinion, arguing that people should be allowed to sue on behalf of non-living things writing, “[t]hose who have that intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled are its legitimate spokesmen.” This opinion is shared by those who continue to argue for environmental personhood in the United States and around the world.

Canada
The Magpie river in the Côte-Nord region of Quebec was given a set of rights, including the right to take legal action, by the Innu Council of Ekanitshit and Minganie county. Representatives can be appointed by the regional municipality and the Innu to act on behalf of the river and take legal action to protect its rights which they define as: “the right to flow; the right to respect for its cycles; the right for its natural evolution to be protected and preserved; the right to maintain its natural biodiversity; the right to fulfil its essential functions within its ecosystem; the right to maintain its integrity; the right to be safe from pollution; the right to regenerate and be restored; and finally, the right to sue.” This aligns with the belief that the river is an independent, living entity separate from human activity.

Ecocide
The concept of environmental protection on behalf of the environment is not new, and widespread harm to the environment has a name: ecocide. The Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide defines ecocide as "unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts." There are advocates of making ecocide an international crime, like the crimes dealt with by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This would place ecocide alongside currently recognized international crimes like genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. If added, ecocide would be the only crime “in which human harm is not a prerequisite for prosecution.” This protection of nature for nature’s sake is central to the advocacy behind environmental personhood. Do human beings need to be harmed to warrant legal action? The concept of ecocide is not new, nor is the advocacy for adding it to the Rome Statute of the ICC.

Arguments for and against[edit]
The concept of environmental personhood is controversial, even among environmentalists. One can advocate for a legal framework that acknowledges rights of nature, but may not believe that environmental personhood is the right way to implement it. Proponents of environmental personhood argue that it is valuable to be able to sue on behalf of the environment, because it would allow for environmental protection that does not rely on harm being done to human beings. Environmental personhood also better honors the significant relationships of Indigenous peoples to their environment.

However, there are arguments against the concept of environmental personhood. One concern is that the status of legal personhood implies a right not only to sue but to be sued. Can a river be liable for damage it causes in a flood? Would the guardians of that river be asked to pay for damages caused by natural disasters? Community Environmental Defense Fund lawyer Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin writes that this concern is “one of the things that could derail in my opinion the ability for rights in nature to be a check on destructive activities and instead could set up kind of like natural resource trustees for ecosystems where there's a flood and now the ecosystem has to pay out of the fund that would otherwise have gone to restoring habitat that had been destroyed.”

Another concern is that even with a legal right to sue on behalf of a natural entity, lawsuits are expensive. There are issues of environmental justice if the cost to exercise the right to sue is inaccessible. Other issues arise when environmental entities exist beyond the bounds of the jurisdiction that decided on environmental personhood, which was the case with a river which held rights as a legal person in Uttarakhand, India. According to reporting by National Public Radio, there are also cases where the rights of environmental entities may be at odds with the rights of human beings, “Many of the [environmental personhood] laws have also been met with resistance from industry, farmers and river communities, who argue that giving nature personhood infringes on their rights and livelihoods.”