On Saturday 27 April I attended a Rights of Nature Workshop hosted by the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA), Tree Sisters and Friends of the Forest. My objective was to learn more about the Rights of Nature movement and how legal structures can be applied to protect our local environment.
Dr Michelle Maloney from AELA provided an insight into the history of events that have shaped her work and provided case studies of where the same rights held by human beings and corporations have been granted to mother nature.
A lot of the early work was undertaken by indigenous cultures, with Bolivia and Ecuador leading the way. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognise the legal rights of nature in its constitution. Since that time, several cases have been brought to Ecuadorian courts on behalf of nature. In 2010 the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth was signed in Bolivia.
This was followed by a long lull. Nothing much happened in this sphere. But gradually more communities around the globe began toying with the idea that rights exist where life exists.
Lately activity has surged with New Zealand, India, Mexico, Bangladesh and Bavaria assigning legal status to rivers, mountains, forests and species.
AELA’s work focuses around five core themes:
- Changing culture
- Reconnecting with what matters
- Building communities
- Creating alternatives and
- Transforming laws and structures
The Pizza Dilemma
Dr Maloney explained governance structures using a simple metaphor of a family enjoying a pizza for dinner. There is one slice left – how do you decide who gets the last slice?
Attendees all provided different views, ranging from the dad getting it (patriarchy), the one who paid for it gets it (capitalism), sharing it (socialism), the person who is the hungriest / skinniest (need), even giving it to the dog!
Governance structure plays a big part in how we approach the rights of nature – who gets to speak for the trees? In the same way that our legal system assigns guardianship to children under a certain age, the elderly or those who for some reason can’t speak for themselves, the guardianship of a place can also be assigned to people or groups.
The pizza also represents limits – there’s only so many slices to go around. How do we deal with the planetary boundaries and ecological limits that exists in our growth obsessed culture?
From an Earth centred perspective, human laws and governance should be designed to ensure human activities fit within the ecological limits and productive capacity of the natural world, so that all members of the Earth community – plants, animals and life supporting ecosystems – are able to exist, thrive and evolve.
To do this, we need to redesign the rules that govern our societies – whether it’s formal laws, rules or our moral/cultural ways of being so that we understand, protect and nurture the health of the Earth community. We need to design human activities so that they ‘fit within’ ecological health at all scales – from our local ecosystems, to wider bio-regions, and ultimately within our Planetary Boundaries.
Civil disobedience as a tool to drive change
The expansion of rights has always met with resistance. Slaves didn’t just wake up free one day, it took years to abolish slavery and acknowledge them as human beings rather than property. Suffragettes had to fight for the rights of women. First Nation peoples across the globe are still struggling to change laws which existed to justify the cruel methods colonisers used when they seized countries and societies.
Legal rights for nature can be separated into two streams – (1) the rights of nature across the board and (2) giving legal personhood for a particular ecosystem.
Michelle explained how the Whanganui River in New Zealand received legal status through a treaty between the Maori Trust and the Crown. Ironically this didn’t happen because they were forward thinking but because neither party could agree on who should control the river. Making the river its own legal entity solved the problem.
History shows that an effective way to generate change is to use civil disobedience as a tool to push back against the system and raise awareness about an issue. And, in 2006, it was people power that led to the establishment of the Community Environment Legal Defence Fund (CELDF).
CELDF developed a legal framework – known as the Community Bill of Rights – which communities across the US are now advancing into law to secure community and nature’s rights, address corporate “rights” and protect communities from threats such as GMOs, pipelines, fracking, and pesticides.
By giving legal rights to nature, we can strip corporations of their rights to standing in their jurisdiction. It also provides an opportunity to question the obligations of the Crown, which ultimately should be looking after all constituents and not pandering to the needs of big corporations.
What can we do?
AELA have drafted laws for the Margaret River, Blue Mountains, the Great Barrier Reef and more, and these are available as templates on their website.
We, as communities, need to take every opportunity we can to raise awareness of the rights of all the natural fauna and flora in our geographic regions. We need to fight for ecological health and social justice.
We need to show the political elite that we need more earth centred governance to counter the extinction crisis in Australia and across the globe.
AELA has produced some excellent resources to help communities, and one particular area that could provide significant opportunities here in Noosa is around GreenPrints and Bio Regional Governance.
Australia has eight Eco Regions and 89 Bio Regions. When you overlay the map of our bio-regions with the Aboriginal Australia map outlining first nation laws, the similarities are astounding.
For millions of years, Indigenous people across the globe adhered to the laws of nature, and it was only the straight lines drawn by colonisers that has led to the dire straits we find ourselves in right now.
If each of these Bio Regions were assigned legal rights, we could draft clear guidelines for such a region to thrive. That includes setting ecological limits. To do so, we need to think about what a healthy system looks like and consider different scenarios for our waterways, vegetation, soil and biodiversity.
Consider:
- How does human activity interfere with the health of this system?
- How does economic activity override the rights of the region?
- Who is benefiting?
- Where is the money going?
- What will happen if we continue with business as usual?
Then, armed with this information, we can start retrofitting the system we have and work out a transition plan to where we want to be.
The good news is that there will be lots of work, and each community will be able to create jobs in their efforts to build strong, resilient communities working in harmony with this planet that sustains us.
Bring it on, I say!
