As the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) points out in discussing its “Rights of Nature” work, environmental laws “regulating how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur under law”, are actually permitting the environmental harms to occur. CELDF’s approach takes another tack. It seeks to change the legal standing of natural communities and ecosystems from property subject to commerce legislation to rights-bearing entities with an “inalienable and fundamental right to exist and flourish, and that residents of those communities possess the legal authority to enforce those rights on behalf of those ecosystems”.
CELDF’s Rights of Nature work has been adopted at varying governmental levels. It was adopted by the borough of Tamaqua in Pennsylvania and by the Republic of Ecuador in its 2008 constitution: “With that vote, Ecuador became the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights, leading the way for countries around the world to make this necessary and fundamental change in how we protect nature.”
A general, global statement of the rights of nature, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, was issued at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth last year. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s Associate Director, Mari Margil, spoke at the Conference and was a part of the Working Group on the Rights of Mother Earth, helping to draft the Declaration.
In her discussion of the Declaration, Vicki Lipski, in Transition Voice, notes, “According to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, the proposed Declaration will be presented to the United Nations by Bolivia – site of the Conference – on or around Earth Day 2011. Its adoption will be a crowning achievement for the United Nations.”