Earth Law in practice.
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Rights of Nature in Practice. Lessons from an emerging global movement.
This REPORT provides a practical comparative overview of global Earth Law developments as at 2021, for lawyers, communities and others.
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Bringing Law Back to Earth. Exploring the potential impacts of the rights of nature movement on the human rights field
This REPORT draws together emerging themes from a roundtable series with lawyers, academics and advocates interested in the cross-fertilisation between the global Earth Law movement and the human rights field.
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Earth Law Futures. Insights from Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia on the implementation of rights of nature, ecological legal personhood and 'living entity' laws and policies
Explore the Earth Law (rights of nature, ecological legal personhood and ‘living entity’ status) interactive map to find out about many of the key cases and advocacy developments around the world, or click HERE to access full case studies, designed for use by lawyers and communities in strategic litigation and effective advocacy.
What is Earth Law?
In recent years, we have witnessed the spread of the ‘Earth Law’ movement (including rights of nature, ecological legal personhood and ‘living entity’ status) around the world, being formal legal recognition of the inherent rights of natural systems such as rivers, forests and more to exist, regenerate and evolve. Such developments have arisen as a result of litigation focused directly or indirectly on human rights or environmental protection, as remedial justice in long-standing land disputes, in local legislation and in connection with the foregrounding of Indigenous perspectives in constitution drafting.
The legal impacts are momentous. As we transform our systems through Earth Law, we shift our framing of the natural world from a collection of objects or mere property for the use, control and extraction by humans, towards a worldview that situates nature as living systems with the right to be heard and participate in decision-making, budget-analysis and dispute resolution processes. Such a legal framework can, among other outcomes, strengthen human rights strategies and support the momentum towards mandatory human rights and environmental assessment of corporate decision-making and practice.
While recognising nature as a rights-holder or legal ‘person’ appears unconventional (at least to the current dominant culture), it is notable that who we have accepted in such roles has changed dramatically over time, with significant consequences. For example, historically many people have been excluded from partial or full legal recognition on the grounds of gender, race and disability. Even today, the rights each of us exercise can be limited on the basis of citizenship, age, mental capacity and so on. Beyond the human, we have also accepted legal personhood of corporations, which permits their active inclusion and participation - albeit via human proxy - in legal contexts.
Why are these developments significant?
The expanding Earth Law movement represents a break with our widespread habit of treating nature as a passive backdrop for the human experience, and consequently reflects a profound transformation in our human relationship with place.
As we put in place legal processes to facilitate Earth Law in practice, we inevitably pay greater attention to what is needed to support the health and flourishing of natural systems, how they move through cycles and evolve over time, and their interconnections with other ecosystems, animals and humans. In repositioning humans as one among many communities on earth, we begin to release the perceived separation between humans and the rest of the natural world.
The Earth Law movement is not a silver bullet with respect to ecological and social crises, and gaps exist between these developments and implementation in reality. However, the very act of asking and exploring emerging questions - such as which more-than-human entities should have their rights recognised, in which circumstances, who would speak and act on their behalf, and even what we mean by the ‘environment’ - is a creative and intentional path towards strengthening legal frameworks that support us to live within planetary environmental boundaries and in alignment with the emerging shared global story of interconnection.