This book examines the increasingly widespread movement to recognise the environment as a legal person. Several countries have now recognized that nature, or parts of nature, have juristic personhood. In this book, the concept of legal personhood and its incidents are interrogated with a view to determining whether this is, or could be, a positive contribution to modern environmental problems. Surveying historical and current positions on the juristic concept of legal personhood, the book engages recent legislation and case law, in order to consider the attempt in several countries to vest personhood in rivers, river basins and ecosystems. Comparing approaches in a range of countries – including New Zealand, India, Ecuador, the United States and Australia, it addresses the methods employed, the purported aims, the mechanisms for enforcement, and the entrenchment of legal protections. Throughout, the book elicits the difficult relationship between an historically anthropocentric idea of personhood and its extension beyond the human; concluding that the attribution of personhood to the environment is an important, but limited, contribution to environmental sustainability. Accessibly written, this book will appeal to scholars, students and others with interests in environmental law, environmental science and public policy, and ecology more generally.

Environmental personhood is the nascent notion of designating parts of nature as legal persons entitled to independent regard and consideration. Several jurisdictions, including areas in the United States, have developed versions of legal regimes granting rights directly to nature in and for itself. Protecting the environment in this manner has gained momentum in the current moment as a result of and in reaction to the seemingly quotidian status of corporate personhood in protecting corporate rights. But environmental personhood need not be seen only as a foil for corporate power. Because corporate personhood is an example of how we came to understand a non-human entity as a bearer of rights, we can use lessons from the contingent development of this doctrine to inform the development of environmental personhood. As evidenced by the history of corporate personhood, there is no entirely unqualified right that applies to all persons across all circumstances; the actual way a “right” plays out is always dependent upon social, historical, and political context. The ways in which the acknowledgement of the rights of nature have played out in the jurisdictions in which it is present also evidence this statement. Law and its social context are of course mutually constitutive; it is possible today to imagine that new views on environmental precariousness and new legal conceptions of the standing of nature might combine to make the doctrine of environmental personhood a robustly protective one.

In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.

Originally published in 1972, Should Trees Have Standing? was a rallying point for the then burgeoning environmental movement, launching a worldwide debate on the basic nature of legal rights that reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Now, in the 35th anniversary edition of this remarkably influential book, Christopher D. Stone updates his original thesis and explores the impact his ideas have had on the courts, the academy, and society as a whole. At the heart of the book is an eminently sensible, legally sound, and compelling argument that the environment should be granted legal rights. For the new edition, Stone explores a variety of recent cases and current events--and related topics such as climate change and protecting the oceans--providing a thoughtful survey of the past and an insightful glimpse at the future of the environmental movement. This enduring work continues to serve as the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights, so that the voiceless elements in nature are protected for future generations.

Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice is the much-needed complementary volume to Sustainability and the Rights of Nature: An Introduction (CRC Press, May 2017). The first book laid out the international precursors for the Rights of Nature doctrine and described the changes required to create a Rights of Nature framework that supports Nature in a sustainable relationship rather than as an exploited resource. This follow-up work provides practitioners from diverse cultures around the world an opportunity to describe their own projects, successes, and challenges in moving toward a legal personhood for Nature. It includes contributions from Nepal, New Zealand, Canadian Native American cultures, Kiribati, the United States and Scotland, amongst others, by practitioners working on projects that can be integrated into a Rights of Nature framework. The authors also tackle required changes to shift the paradigm, such as thinking of Nature in a sacred manner, reorienting Nature’s rights and human rights, the conceptualization of restoration, and the removal of large-scale energy infrastructure. Curated by experts in the field, this expansive collection of papers will prove invaluable to a wide array of policymakers and administrators, environmental advocates and conservation groups, tribal land managers, and communities seeking to create or maintain a sustainable relationship with Nature. Features: Addresses existing projects that are successfully implementing a Rights of Nature legal framework, including the difference it makes in practice Presents the voices of practitioners not often recognized who are working in innovative ways towards sustainability and the need to grant a voice to Nature in human decision-making Explores new ideas from the insights of a diverse range of cultures on how to grant legal personhood to Nature, restrain damaging human activity, create true sustainability, and glimpse how a Rights of Nature paradigm can work in different societies Details the potential pitfalls to Rights of Nature governance and land use decisions from people doing the work, as well as their solutions Discusses the basic human needs for shelter, food, and community in entirely new ways: in relationship with Nature, rather than in conquest of it

The book also draws heavily on empirical research on consciousness and cognition in non-human animals as a way of approaching the question of which animals, if any, are "persons," or at least "near-persons".

Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.