Environmental personhood

In 2014, Te Urewera National Park was declared Te Urewera, an environmental legal entity.[4] The area encompassed by Te Urewera ceased to be a government-owned national park and was transformed into freehold, inalienable land owned by itself.[5]

Following the same trend, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was declared to be a legal person in 2017.[6] This new legal entity was named Te Awa Tupua and is now recognised as “an indivisible and living whole from the mountains to the sea, incorporating the Whanganui River and all of its physical and metaphysical elements.”[7] The river would be represented by two guardians, one from the Whanganui iwi and the other from the Crown.[8]

Also in 2017, the New Zealand government signed an agreement granting similar legal personality to Mount Taranaki and pledging a name change for Egmont National Park, which surrounds the mountain.[9]

The Ganges and Yamuna Rivers are now considered legal persons in an effort to combat pollution. The rivers are sacred to Hindu culture for their healing powers and attraction of pilgrims who bathe and scatter the ashes of their dead.[10] The rivers have been heavily polluted by 1.5 billion litres of untreated sewage and 500 million litres of industrial waste entering the rivers daily.[11]

The High Court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered in March 2017 that the Ganges and its main tributary, the Yamuna, be assigned the status of legal entities. The rivers would gain “all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” This decision meant that polluting or damaging the rivers is equivalent to harming a person. The court cited the example of the New Zealand Whanganui River, which was also declared to possess full rights of a legal person.[11]

This development of environmental personhood has been met with scepticism as merely announcing that the Ganges and Yamuna are living entities will not save them from significant, ongoing pollution. There is a possible need to change long-held cultural attitudes towards the Ganges, which hold that the river has self-purifying properties.[12]

There is further criticism that the guardianship of the rivers was only granted to Uttarakhand, a region in northern India which houses a small part of the rivers’ full extent. The Ganges flows for 2,525 km through Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, with only a 96 km stretch running through Uttarakhand. Only a small section of the 1,376 km Yamuna tributary runs through Uttarakhand – which also crosses through the states of Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.[12]

Regardless of scepticism surrounding the decision of the Uttarakhand High Court, proclaiming these vulnerable rivers as legal entities invokes a movement of change towards environmental and cultural rights protection. The decisions may be built upon as a foundation for future environmental legislative change.

In 2006, a small community in Pennsylvania called Tamaqua Borough worked with a rights of nature group called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).[13] Together, the groups drafted legislation to protect the community and its environment from the dumping of toxic sewage.[14] Since 2006, CELDF has assisted with over 30 communities in ten states across the United States to develop local laws codifying the rights of nature. CELDF also assisted in the drafting of Ecuador's 2008 constitution following a national referendum.[15]

Besides Tamaqua, several other towns throughout the United States have drafted legislation that would, in effect, give nature natural rights. In 2008, residents in a town by the name of Shapleigh, Maine added a new section to their cities legal code. This new section stripped the rights of corporations granted by the United States Constitution, and granted rights to the nature and natural bodies of water that surrounded Shapleigh.[16] What prompted the change to Shapleigh's legal code was a plan by the Nestle Corporation, which owns several water bottle brands such as Poland Spring, to pump truckloads of groundwater from Shapleigh to a water bottling facility.[17] As of 2019, no lawsuits have been filed against Shapleigh, Maine for the change in the town's legal code, and the Nestle Corporation has not chosen to challenge the code either. In this case the CELDF did not assist the residents of Shapleigh in drafting sections 99-11 through 99-12 of their legal code, they were instead assisted by lawyers from Vermont.[17]

In April 2013, the CELDF assisted officials in Mora County, New Mexico in creating an ordinance that limited the ability of corporations to extract gas and oil, and gave rights to the natural ecosystems and bodies of water that resided within Mora County.[18] This ordinance made Mora County the very first place within the United States to ban the production of gas and oil, within a certain area, in an official statement.[19] A lawsuit was filed against Mora County on November 12, 2013 which asserted that Mora County's ordinance infringed on corporations rights, especially the first, fifth, and fourteenth amendments.[20] In January 2015, Mora County's ordinance was overthrown by U.S. District Judge James O. Browning as he viewed the ordinance to violate the first amendment rights of corporations.[20]

In early 2014, Grant Township, Indiana, Pennsylvania enlisted the CELDF's help in drafting an ordinance that would give the natural bodies of water surrounding Grant Township natural rights. A company named Pennsylvania General Energy (PGE) had converted an old oil and gas well into a "wastewater injection well," and residents became concerned for what that could mean for the natural ecosystems surrounding their township.[21] The water in a wastewater injection well is waste that is left over from a process called fracking. This water can contain harmful pollutants and chemicals that can poison groundwater. In Grant Township, most residents rely on the Little Mahoning Creek for their water needs. If the wastewater injection well were to leak, there is a possibility it could contaminate the Little Mahoning. The risk of contamination is what prompted Grant Township residents to ask the CELDF for assistance in drafting an ordinance. Grant Township's ordinance gave natural rights to the ecosystems and bodies of water that were within the borders of Grant Township.[22] Grant Township's ordinance also stripped corporations of their rights deeming that corporations would not be seen as "persons" within the borders of Grant Township.[22] In August 2014, PGE sued Grant Township which began a legal battle that would last for almost five years.[23] Grant Township lost the lawsuit against PGE in April 2019, and Judge Susan Baxter ordered Grant Township to pay PGE's legal expenses which were over $100,000. In addition, Grant Township's ordinance was declared invalid.[24]

On 26 February 2019, voters in Toledo, Ohio passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.[25] The main point of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights is that Lake Erie has the right to "flourish."[25] Residents of Toledo, and surrounding areas, have suffered times where the tap water, which comes from Lake Erie, was not safe to drink, or use, due to pollution.[26] Cases of unsafe water conditions, amongst other pollution problems, is what prompted residents of Toledo to ask the CELDF for help.[26] On 27 February 2019, the day after the Lake Erie Bill of Rights was passed by voters, a lawsuit was filed by an Ohio farmer.[25][27] On 27 February 2020, U.S. District Judge Jack Zouhary invalidated the bill,[28] ruling it was "unconstitutionally vague" and beyond "the power of municipal government in Ohio." [29]

In the summer of 2019, the Yurok tribe in northern California gave the Klamath River personhood status.[30]

The rights of nature “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles” have been proclaimed under Ecuador’s 2008 constitution.[31] This occurred after a national referendum in 2008, allowing the Ecuador constitution to reflect rights for nature, a world first.[32] Every person and community has the right to advocate on nature's behalf.[33] The Constitution proclaims that the “State shall give incentives to natural persons and legal entities and to communities to protect nature and to promote respect for all the elements comprising an ecosystem.”[34]

The first successful case of the rights of nature implementation under Ecuador constitutional law was presented before the Provincial Court of Justice of Loja in 2011. This case involved the Vilcabamba River as the plaintiff, representing itself with its own rights to ‘exist’ and ‘maintain itself’ – as it attempted to halt construction of a government highway project interfering with the natural health of the river. This case was brought before court by two individuals, Richard Frederick Wheeler and Eleanor Geer Huddle, as legal guardians acting in favour of nature – specifically the Vilcabamba River. A constitutional injunction was granted in favour of the Vilcabamba River and against the Provincial government of Loja, attempting to conduct the environmentally-harmful project. The project was forced to be halted and the area was to be rehabilitated.[35]

The constitutional change in Ecuador was followed legislatively by Bolivia in 2010, passing the ‘Law of the Rights of Mother Earth’ (Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra). This legislation designates Mother Earth the character of ‘a collective subject of public interest’[36] with inherent rights specified in the law.[37] The Law of the Rights of Mother Earth give aspects of legal personhood to the natural environment. Judicial action can be taken for infringements against individuals and groups as part of Mother Earth as ‘a collective subject of public interest’.[38] The legislation states that “Mother Earth is the dynamic living system made up of the indivisible community of all living systems, living, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny.”[39]

The Colombia Constitutional Court found in November 2016 that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to "protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration." This ruling came about as a result of degradation to the river basin from mining, impacting nature and harming of Indigenous peoples and their culture. The court referred to the New Zealand declaration of the Whanganui River as a legal person holding environmental personhood. The court ordered that joint guardianship would be undertaken in the representation of the Atrato River basin. Similarly to the New Zealand declaration, the representatives would come from the national government and the Indigenous people living in the basin.[40]

The court stated:

“(I)t is the human populations that are interdependent of the natural world – and not the opposite – and that they must assume the consequences of their actions and omissions with the nature. It is a question of understanding this new sociopolitical reality with the aim of achieving a respectful transformation with the natural world and its environment, as has happened before with civil and political rights…Now is the time to begin taking the first steps to effectively protect the planet and its resources before it is too late…”[40]

In April 2018 the Supreme Court of Colombia has issued a decision recognizing the Amazon River ecosystem as a subject of rights and beneficiary of protection.[41]