The Rights of Nature legal movement is a promising alternative to the regulation-based framework that has undergirded agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has overseen a rapid decline in the country’s ecological health since it was formed in 1970. As Shannon Biggs and Mari Margil wrote in the 2011 book The Rights of Nature, environmental regulation has not only been futile in preventing or ameliorating ecological catastrophe, but “these laws actually codify, enforce, and uphold continued pollution and destruction rather than working towards ending such practices.” Rights-based frameworks, on the other hand, are proactive. Rather than test the bounds of harm that ecosystems and their inhabitants can endure, Rights of Nature laws seek to repair and avoid harm altogether so that ecosystems and their inhabitants can truly thrive. 

Rights of Nature laws are a potentially powerful tool to oppose fossil fuel development and other projects that both destroy surrounding ecosystems and exacerbate the climate crisis. In a system where the elevation of corporate rights over communities and natural systems is constitutionally embedded, Rights of Nature laws may be key in helping communities to resist projects that threaten their forests, rivers, mountains, deserts, lakes, and their own wellbeing. For instance: 

• Ecuador enshrined the Rights of Pachamama into their constitution in 2008 and have since had several successful constitutional court rulings applying the country’s rights of nature laws. In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled that mining in a protected region of a rainforest would violate the rights of nature, and therefore the government revoked mining permits granted to Enami and Cornerstone Capital Resources for exploratory operations within Los Cedros Reserve. In a country whose economy is still highly dependent on extractive industry and foreign investment, this was a landmark decision. 
• In an effort to keep fracking out of Pittsburgh, a city that has experienced the toxic legacy of extractive industry firsthand, community organizers had to get creative, knowing that Pennsylvania allows fracking and state law says that municipalities aren’t allowed to regulate the oil and gas industry any more strictly than the state. When they learned about the Rights of Nature framework, they decided that that was their best bet, and then they set to work organizing. In 2010, the Pittsburgh City Council unanimously passed an ordinance awarding rights to nature and banning fracking. 
• In 2017, the Ponca Nation became one of the first tribes in the country to enact a Rights of Nature law, not only to better align human law with natural law, but also as a strategic anti-fracking measure. In the years prior, Ponca, Oklahoma had become an epicenter for fracking and injection wells, resulting in poisoned water, land, and air, massive fish kills, hundreds of earthquakes in the region per year, and alarmingly high levels of asthma, cancer, and other disease. The passage of the Rights of Nature statute has successfully banned fracking on the Ponca Reservation. 

Rights of Nature laws may be a particularly potent tool for tribal nations across Turtle Island and beyond to safeguard their subsistence practices, sacred sites, and sovereignty on their traditional lands. For instance: 

• In New Zealand, following 140 years of struggle over the Whanganui River, the Whanganui Maori passed a historic, precedent-setting law granting the river personhood status. With the passage of The Te Awa Tupua Act, the New Zealand Parliament appointed two guardians of the river, including one representative of the Maori people and one representative of the New Zealand government. Now, any project that could affect the river must go through the Maori representative and the local tribes, and the health of the river, fisheries, and surrounding ecosystems must be prioritized. The law doesn’t offer iron-clad protections for the river, and implementation of the framework can be messy and difficult, but it still has great potential to elevate Indigenous sovereignty, rights, and worldviews in New Zealand. 
• In 2021, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources on behalf of sacred manoomin, or wild rice, in an effort to stop construction of Enbridge Energy’s Line 3 tar sands oil pipeline. Amongst several other counts (namely around honoring treaty rights), White Earth Nation contended in Manoomin v. Minnesota that the state violated the rights of manoomin by issuing a permit allowing Enbridge to use 5 billion gallons of water for construction and pipeline testing during a terrible drought, which threatened the manoomin’s ability to exist and flourish. The lawsuit has not been successful thus far, but the tribal rights of nature movement still holds tremendous promise in helping to protect ecosystems on tribal lands, enforcing hunting, fishing, and gathering rights on tribal lands, and potentially shutting down fossil fuel infrastructure and/or preventing fossil fuel development. 

The Rights of Nature framework may also be instrumental in instigating a larger economic, legal, political, and spiritual paradigm shift predicated upon a recognition of our interdependence with the more-than-human world, or as Casey Hamp-Horinek would say, “the oneness of all and the allness of one.” If the climate crisis is a crisis of disconnection, in which the dominant society continues to exploit, pollute, and extract from the natural world with little regard for repercussions, then the Rights of Nature movement can help to address the root of the crisis and usher in an era characterized by return to reverence, humility, and interconnection.