The rights of nature

Nov 10, 2026 | Thoughts about the park

In the park there is a magnificent oak, tall, stately and noble, bearing many sacred associations.  There is a chestnut tree, bountiful with conkers.  Perhaps it is an “armada tree”.  There is a beech tree which throws out astonishingly abundant mast.  The beech tree in the front garden of 1 Park Road is perhaps the finest tree of the area. 

What if each of these trees had a lawyer, according to the rights of nature?

“For and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey the entire possession of itself and all land within eight feet of the tree on all sides.”

Colonel William H.

In the early 1800s,in Atlanta Georgia, Colonel William H. loved a certain tree on his property so much that he wrote up a deed giving it ownership of itself and the land surrounding it (about eight feet in all directions).

On July 23,2026, noting that “rivers can’t be polluted in the name of religion”, the Madras High Court recognised the rights of the Tamirabarani River as a juristic person – a non-human legal entity that has the capacity to hold rights and duties just like a human being.

The Waccamaw Tribe in the US passed a resolution, Aug  2026,  recognizing the rights of the Yadkin-Pee Dee Watershed and its surrounding forests, wetlands, native plants and wildlife, making it the first governmental body in South Carolina to recognize RoN.

How a frog stopped traffic

A tiny frog, just a few centimetres long, stopped an entire road in Ecuador, February 2026. A court halted a road project in Angamarca to protect the Jambato harlequin frog under the Rights of Nature.  Ecuador has been something of a pioneer in establishing rights of nature in its constitution.

In May 2026, several local authorities in England and Wales from all political hues, signed a charter recognising the rights of the River Wye. The charity River Action has warned that the river is ‘on the brink of ecological collapse’, through foul pollution, and the new charter aims to affirm the river’s rights to flow naturally, remain free from pollution, and sustain diverse native species.

Lough Neagh, a vitally important water source in Northern Ireland, and the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, is dying through the effects of  toxic blue-green cyanobacteria algal blooms, eutrophication, and systemic pollution.

The “rights of nature” is a legal and philosophical framework that insists that natural entities – such as rivers, forests, and ecosystems – are not  human property, for people to treat and exploit as they please;   they are  independent legal subjects with inherent rights.  Such entities should be allowed to exist regardless of their economic value to humans.  They should have legal personhood, allowing them, or their representative, to appear in courts.  This challenges very long-held ideas about land and water in our legal system.  Much of the drive for the rights of nature came originally from indigenous groups, in places like South America, who do not hold western worldviews.  The movement argues for a new jurisprudence, which treats nature as having rights of its own, and which cannot be exploited by human whims.

Anthropocentrism is increasingly being recognised as a highly destructive concept.  There has been much discussion and argument around the “creation mandate” of Genesis:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

This view, of human domination of nature, is deeply entrenched in common law, and in social institutions.  As Paul Powlesland, a barrister and one of the most eloquent exponents of RoN in the UK, puts it:

Another key aspect of Rights of Nature is legal personhood. It is perhaps a testimony to the ingenuity of English lawyers that we managed to devise legal rights and legal personhood for completely fictitious entities like companies before natural entities like trees and rivers which existed long before humans even came to these islands and which we fundamentally rely on for our own existence.

Paul Powlesland, barrister

In 1972, law professor Christopher Stone published his seminal article “Should Trees Have Standing: Law, Morality and the Environment?” in the Southern California Law Review, laying the theoretical foundation for legal rights for natural objects.

The British Ecological Society has considered the development of the movement in the UK.

The establishment of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature was a very important development. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN) establishes that in order to ensure an environmentally sustainable future, humans must reorient themselves from an exploitative and ultimately self-destructive relationship with nature, to one that honors the deep interrelation of all life and contributes to the health and integrity of the natural environment. 

Small steps are happening. The town of Lewes in Sussex has officially become the first town in England to grant formal rights to its trees, hedgerows, and forests. The Town Council voted unanimously to adopt a “Tree Charter,” which gives its trees and intrinsic right to flourish.

The UK is utterly shaped by human activity; much of its original woodland has been destroyed and it is often described as one of the most “nature depleted” countries in Europe.  Destructive wildfires and devastating floods are no longer occasional items on the evening news, but are close, daily realities.  Existing legal frameworks have not prevented these catastrophes.  Perhaps a new way forward is needed.

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