It Might Be Time To Grant Legal Rights to Nature

The “rights of nature” is a new concept: that nature possesses fundamental rights, just as humans do. It derives from an old concept rooted in traditional societies that saw themselves as part of nature, not distinct from it. Ancient India, including people who lived at the time of the Rig Veda, were nature worshippers. The Rig Veda is said to have been compiled in the Bronze Age, between 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The Rig Vedic communities revered several deities: personifications of the elements of nature like fire, water, sky and earth, and they treated the environment as a sacred whole. The chief deity was Agni (fire), and others like Indra (lightning/rain), Varuna (water) and Prithvi (earth). India’s ancient seers believed the universe was governed by a moral law: living in harmony with nature and maintaining its ecological balance was essential for fulfilling one’s “dharma”.

Like ancient Indians, many other primeval people were nature worshippers too. These included the Shinto community in Japan, Celtic and Germanic tribes, Mayans and Aztec people, Native Americans and ancient Greeks and Romans. Nature held primacy in these civilisations. This changed in later years and far from being worshipped, Nature became a resource to be exploited for financial gain, with little regard for its survival and sanctity. As humans degraded nature and systematically destroyed it, the unpleasant and threatening manifestations of this destruction became evident today.

A hallmark of our era is destruction of ecosystems, disruption of biospheres, polluted rivers, biodiversity loss and species extinction. Instead of conserving Nature, that has nurtured us for millennia, we appear hell-bent on destroying it. We have already breached seven of nine critical planetary boundaries and pushed the planet into uncharted territory: ecosystems are devastated and the weather has become completely unstable.

Freshwater in all forms, like surface water, groundwater, even soil moisture, is being depleted at unsustainable rates due to overexploitation.

In this backdrop of an utterly ravaged nature, the concept of the Rights of Nature took shape as an attempt to salvage what one could to ensure the continued survival of the human race.

There is a Rights of Nature movement in many nations seeking systemic change in how we treat nature. This movement is trying to develop fresh concepts in the legal system to make it work for the protection of the environment instead of enabling the rights of certain people to exploit the environment. Most Rights of Nature legal precedent is very recent, having emerged in just the last few years as a direct response to the failure of modern environmental law to adequately address the escalating ecological crisis.

The Rights of Nature approach attempts a transformation in the way the status of nature is upheld in society. It says Nature possesses its own rights and can’t be treated merely as human property. Nature’s rights include the right to exist and to thrive, and most important, the right to restoration. Since the Rights of Nature accords it legal standing, it can be directly defended in a court of law. Ultimately, for these rights to be successfully implemented, humans must act as guardians or stewards of the natural world.

Rivers have understandably become a key focus in the Rights of Nature movement, since river systems are under extreme pressure everywhere. Many of the world’s rivers suffer from extreme over-exploitation, bringing about fundamental changes in riverine ecosystems, habitats and watersheds.

With its established history of worshipping nature, especially its rivers, India could have led the global trend to demand the Rights of Nature by personal example and enlightened legislation. But it failed to do so because of a Supreme Court intervention in a pioneering attempt by the Uttarakhand high court.

 The Uttarakhand case: In 2014, a Haridwar resident, Mohammad Salim, filed a PIL on illegal construction, mining, and stone-crushing on the banks of the Ganga. In response, the Uttarakhand high court ruled in 2017 that rivers were in danger of losing their existence and extended to them “all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person”. This led to declaring the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as “Living Legal Entities”.

This historic legal breakthrough to establish that Nature had rights was, however, short-lived. In 2017 the Supreme Court stayed the high court order, in a sense saying that India’s two most important rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, cannot be viewed as “Living Entities”. The stay came in response to an appeal by the Uttarakhand government that making the state solely accountable for the upkeep of rivers spanning multiple states was impractical and required Central government intervention. This put paid to a far-sighted legal ruling that could have gone a long way to uphold the rights of rivers and to protect them from pollution and degradation.

While the India case lies stalled, other countries have moved forward to provide legal protection to rivers by granting them legal personhood or inherent rights. Ecuador in 2008 became the first country to formally embed the Rights of Nature, including rivers and ecosystems, into its Constitution, allowing citizens to legally defend the environment. New Zealand had enacted legislation in 2014 granting the Whanganui River legal personhood, giving it all the rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. In Colombia, the Atrato River was recognised as a legal entity in 2016, possessing rights to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. In a historic ruling in 2019, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh recognised all rivers in the country as legal persons and appointed the National River Conservation Commission as their legal guardian. Finally, in Canada, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality passed resolutions in 2021 giving the Magpie River legal personhood, granting it rights to flow and be free from pollution.