Local, National, and International Rights of Nature

Abstract

We have seen so far the alleged intellectual origins of the idea of rights for nature, as well as its paradigmatic case to date. In terms of practical implementation however, Ecuador was not the first case of rights for nature in the world. That distinction goes to Tamaqua Borough, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, USA which, in 2006, passed a municipal ordinance recognizing nature’s rights. Two years later, Ecuador became the first constitutional implementation in the world, and that further emboldened others to appropriate the rights mechanism for the representation of nature. Many more municipalities across the US have since passed ordinances that include rights for nature, Bolivia has approved a law package dealing specifically with what they call the rights of mother earth, New Zealand has granted rights of personhood to a river, and advocates have taken the right of nature to the United Nations. This chapter will look at all of these developments in turn, starting from the municipal level up. In the process, I will analyze the basic structure of representing through rights in all of these cases and show it to be fundamentally similar to the Ecuadorian one.