Literature Review

Examples abound of national and international legal developments that indicate growing concern and respect for animals. However, a key barrier remains: animals are not recognized as legal persons and therefore do not have standing to pursue independent legal action. This significantly limits the scope for legal redress when animals’ interests are harmed. This article examines recent attempts in the United States and Europe to establish standing for animals via strategic litigation and the barriers that have so far undermined this project. The article argues that, despite their lack of success to date, cases that seek to establish standing for animals should continue to be pursued. Societal views about the value of animals’ lives are continually evolving such that these cases may soon be successful. Furthermore, even if unsuccessful, these cases help in creating the socio-cultural space required to redefine the human–animal divide and potentially transform animals into rights bearers.

This paper argues that, in spite of recent judicial practice contributing to the integration of environmental considerations in human rights adjudication, progress in this field remains limited. This is so because of the prevailing ‘individualistic’ perspective in which human rights courts place the environmental dimension of human rights. This results in a reductionist approach which is not consistent with the inherent nature of the environment as a public good indispensable for the life and welfare of society as a whole. The article, rather than advocating the recognition of an independent right to a clean environment, presents a plea for a more imaginative approach based on the consideration of the collective-social dimension of human rights affected by environmental degradation.

This Comment advocates a shift in contemporary standing dosctrine to empower non-profit organizations with an established history of dedication to the cause and relevant expertise to serve as official guardians ad litem on behalf of nonhuman animals interests. The American legal system has numerous mechanisms for representing the rights and interests of nonhumans; any challenges inherent in extending these pre-existing mechanisms to nonhuman animals are minimal compared to an interest in the proper administration of justice. To adequately protect the statuatory rights of nonhuman animals, the legal system must recognize those statutory rights independent of humans and provide a viable means of enforcement. Moreover, the idea of a guardianship for speechless plaintiffs is not new and has been urged on behalf of the natural environment. Such a model is even more compelling as applied to nonhuman animals, because they are sentient beings with the abiliy to feel pain and exercise rational thought. Thus, animals are qualitatively from other legally protected nonhumans and therefore have interests deserving direct legal protection.

In 2008, Ecuador recognized the Constitutional Rights of Nature in a global first. This recognition implies a major shift in the human-nature relationship, from one between a subject with agency (humans) and an exploitable object (nature), to a more equilibrated relationship. However, the lack of a standard legal framework has left room for subjective interpretations and variable implementation. The recent widespread concessioning of pristine ecosystems to mining industries has set up an unprecedented conflict and test of these rights. Currently, a landmark case involving Los Cedros Protected Forest and mining companies has reached the Constitutional Court of Ecuador. If Ecuador’s highest Court rules in favor of Los Cedros and the Rights of Nature, it would set a legal precedent with enormous impact on biological conservation. Such a policy shift offers a novel conservation strategy, through citizen oversight and action. A ruling against Los Cedros and the Rights of Nature, while a major setback for biodiversity conservation, would be taken in stride by the active social movement supporting these goals, with the case likely moving into international courts. Meanwhile, extractive activities would continue and expand, with known consequences for biodiversity.

In the face of widespread degradation of natural resources (including deforestation), and socio-economic disparities, underserved populations from rural and indigenous spaces of the global south face challenges to conserve environmental resources. Many of these spaces, such as sacred-groves, are important to indigenous people and are deeply intertwined with their identity, worldviews and existence. This research, embracing principles of critical/cultural environmental communication, examines how indigenous people of eastern India mobilized collectively to protect their sacred environmental resources, thus improving community members’ well-being. Paying attention to engaged environmental action; critical listening and dialoguing; and local-centric participation, this research argues that contextually meaningful and community-led environmental initiatives help motivate and raise consciousness among future generations as well as among wider indigenous (and marginalized) populations.

Enforcement of the federal trust responsibility is necessary to protect Native America from environmental assault. Traditional lifeways that reach back literally thousands of years are poised in jeopary along with the natural resources upon which they depend. Across Indian country, many tribes are at the brink of losing their fish and wildlife resources, having their land and water supplies contaminated, or having their sacred sites destroyed forever. At least 317 reservations in the United States are threatened by environmental hazards. For example, the Confederated Colville Tribes of Washington, the Chippewas of Wisconsin, the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Tribes of Montana, and several others battle massive mining projects just off reservation boundaries. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe deals with impacts from five coal strop mines, a 2,000-megawatt power plant, and potentially 16,000 new coal methane wells off its reservation. The Pyramid Lake Band of Paiutes and the Klamath, Yakama, Spokane, Salish, and Kootenai Tribes struggle to reclaim enough water in the rivers to sustain their fisheries.The Western Shoshones in Nevada confront a proposed nuclear waste dump, as well as. the existing fallout from nuclear waste testing on their aboriginal lands.6 The fishing tribes of the Columbia River Basin urge changes in hydrosystem operations to prevent the salmon species they have relied on for nearly 10,000 years from becoming extinct.7 The Hopi, Navajo, Sioux, Pueblo, Paiute, Quechan, Blackfeet, Wintu, Zuni, and perhaps dozens of other tribes now fight to protect their sacred sites from desecration. These threats to Indian country are pervasive, and the potential damage is permanent. In the treaty era, the government promised homelands that could sustain tribal lifeways, governments, and economies. But much of the natural web that supports tribal life and culture occurs beyond the boundaries of Indian country. These lands contain species that tribes hunt and fish for, roots and berries that they gather, headwaters and tributaries that flow into their reservation streams, and sacred sites. These are being destroyed at an unprecedented pace, and the pressure from industrial America is both unyielding and unbounded, coming from corporations that feed on growth. While environmental disease may sooner or later affect everyone in the United States, the impacts on Indian country are magnified, because the land base is the linchpin for tribal survival. The trust responsibility should play a role in protecting tribal lands and resources, but the trust doctrine stands in potential jeopardy today as courts collapse protective trust requirements into statutory standards.

In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned the world: the observed warming of temperatures on the planet is very likely caused by human activity. All around the world, deforestation and pollution threaten the ecological equilibriums and the lives of local communities. In some places, economic projects that are harmful for the environment further infringe on ancestral territories of Indigenous groups. To tackle this problem and fight against the economic power of polluting corporations, some countries have passed laws recognizing the rights of nature. While such an idea may at first seem odd, it might not be so difficult to conceptualize it and to implement it. Many rights that we take for granted today used to be seen as implausible, impossible, even dangerous; their recognition has been the result of sometimes long and non-linear struggles against the dominant groups and their worldviews. The rights of nature might well be, one day, considered as much crucial as other rights. Still, their logic is mysterious for many. Are rights not only for those who can claim them ? What do we mean when we talk about nature – are we talking about a tree, a river, a forest, the planet? How can unconscious entities have rights ? How can even a nonliving entity have rights, and who will defend such rights?

Sacred groves are communally-protected forest fragments with significant religious connotations. These community lands attain significance due to biodiversity conservation and provide ecological services in local landscapes. However, it has often been found that interests related to sacred groves are often concentrated towards the groves with conspicuous presence, i.e. in terms of expanse, economic importance or presence of charismatic species, etc. This undermines the role played by the small groves (mostly < 1 ha) and also lead to degradation over time. This commentary analyses the role and need for conservation of small groves in local landscape scenario.

Linda Sheehan identifies as the foundational flaw of modern environmental law its understanding of nature as separate from, and having the function of serving, human beings. It is thus necessary, she argues, to transform environmental law in a way that promotes new relationships among communities and nature. That approach, she maintains, is already contained in the idea of rights. In the same way that human rights can serve to rebuild relationships between human beings, recognising nature's rights can help to rebuild a community's relationship with nature. In this comment, I would like to explore some of the connections between the recognition of the rights of nature in some Latin American countries (namely Ecuador through the Constitution of 2008 and Bolivia through the Law of Mother Earth of 2010), and what has been identified by some authors as the New Latin American Constitutionalism (NLAC). I will argue that not only the legalisation of these rights mandates a fundamentally different relationship between human beings and their natural environment, but that it is strongly connected to more general developments in Latin American constitutional law.

In the past decade, there has been a proliferation of discourse advocating for greater legal protection for the Earth in the form of ‘the rights of nature’. This article critically examines local movements to recognise the ‘the rights of nature’ through critical discourse analysis, focussing on local Community Bills of Rights and localised Rights of Nature ordinances sponsored by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). I argue that while these measures engender the conditions for human communities to challenge the usurpation of the non-human environment by multinational corporations, their effectiveness is limited due to narrow, ideological and anthropocentric conceptualisations of the ‘natural environment’. Taken together, these conceptual shortcomings not only impede the possibility for the measures to be successful in practice, but also impede their potential to repair the disruption in the human relation to non-human beings and environments.

This paper passes in review the different pieces of legislation and court judgments which were issued until now as regards rights of nature, and critically comments on their impact. In a first section, the legislation, including the constitutional texts of some countries, will be presented. In a second section, the implementation of the different measures will be discussed, also with a view, whether the EU could learn from the trend to give natural assets rights of their own. Short concluding remarks will end the contribution.

There is increasing international recognition that in the age of the Anthropocene the wellbeing and rights of humans are inextricably linked to those of natural ecosystems. For two years, international governmental and non-governmental organizations have tracked and reported “co-violations”– violations of both human rights AND rights of Nature (RoN). In the past two years, reported co-violations of human and Nature’s rights have doubled from 100 to 200 cases. Hundreds of activists from over 16 countries, including Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Caceres and Peruvian Maxima Acuna de Chaupe, were killed for defending Nature’s rights and the rights of communities to live in a clean ecosystem (Wilson, Bender, and Sheehan 2016, 3). UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders blamed this “disturbing trend” on “intensified competition for natural resources over the last decades,” noting that “in a globalized world, the quest for economic growth has resulted in a neo-colonial environment that exacerbates conflicts between communities and business actors” (United Nations 2016, 3, 23). While attention is often focused on the Global South, pressures for human and Nature’s rights are also mounting in the Global North, including in the U.S. and New Zealand cases described below. Consequently, some in the global community have concluded that a focus on human rights has left a whole in existing systems for defending rights. Increasingly, communities and governments around the world are working to plug this hole by adopting legal provisions granting rights to Nature.