The relationship of humans to the natural world — from understanding our origins to dealing with contemporary issues of food security and property rights — will be explored in an intriguing four-part conversation series with Hawaiian and Western scholars and activists, starting tomorrow at Maui Arts & Cultural Center. “Man/Woman and Nature: Restoring the Balance,” presented by MACC and Ala Kukui, begins with “Rights of Nature,” a discussion by Kaua‘i native Kapua Sproat, director of the UH Environmental Law Clinic and counsel for Earthjustice’s Mid-Pacific Office, and Thomas Linzey, co-founder and executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

The ‘Sala de la Corte Provincial’ – a provincial court in Ecuador – became the first court ever to vindicate the recently constitutionalized rights of nature. Recognizing the indisputable importance of the rights of nature for present and future generations, the court held the provincial government liable for flooding damages caused by dumping of construction debris. This judicial victory is arguably overshadowed by challenges facing the plaintiffs in seeing the court’s order enforced, however. A subsequent case bears witness to the judiciary’s vindication of rights of nature in Ecuador with ever increasing legal effect.

“The ecological and economic problems we face are rooted in a series of reductionist steps, which have shrunk our imagination and our identity, our purpose on the Earth, and the instruments we use to meet our needs. We are first and foremost Earth citizens. And our highest duty is to maintain the livingsystems of the Earth that support our life. Earth citizenship needs Earthcentered cultures, Earth-based democracy, and Earth-centered economies.” - Vandana Shiva, from the book, The Rights of Nature

Grassroots organizing. Local communities reinserting themselves into the decision making process that impacts their communities. “We the People” reclaiming our role in democracy. Those elements serve as the most effective tools at our disposal today to fight the environmental battles of the 21st century says Thomas Linzey, Executive Director and co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. “There cannot be sustainability unless people who are impacted by certain decisions are actually making the decisions about what impacts their communities,” Linzey said in a recent interview with Wisdom Voices.

Cathy Miorelli doesn’t think of herself as an environmentalist. When Miorelli decided to run for the city council of Tamaqua Borough – a small town in central Pennsylvania where she has lived her entire life – she didn’t have any sort of eco-agenda. It was 2004, and the hottest controversy in Tamaqua involved a proposal by an outside company to dump sewage sludge and coal fly ash into abandoned mining pits on the edge of town....“I was just concerned about everything overall, not really so much the environment,” says Miorelli....“You know, I didn’t run on any kind of platform, saying that I was going to change the world here or anything.” She did change the world, though. Halfway through her one-term stint on the council, Miorelli spearheaded the passage of an anti-sewage sludge ordinance that included a provision recognizing the rights of “natural communities” to flourish – the first law of its kind in the world.

Become part of the urgent declaration for the rights of Mother Earth. The Rights of Nature is emerging as one of the key alternatives to what many critics call severe shortcomings in the current draft proposals centering on a new Green Economy – RIO+20’s main theme to take forward the initiatives of the 1992 Earth Summit. At the recent World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil there were appeals for taking hands across the globe to further the work of alternatives such as the Rights of Nature and Restoration of the Commons to counterbalance the current trend to commodify and marketise ecosystems and nature as a way of combatting climate change. In addition, several recent case studies have shown that communities and lawyers had been able to fight back the vast powers of multi-national companies to exploit their natural resources by applying the concepts of the Rights of Nature.

The community of Bellingham, Washington, has launched a campaign that seeks to revoke the supremacy of corporate rights over the local municipality. Its goal is to reassert the rights of nature as a necessity for the continued survival of the human community, and block the construction of a massive coal-export terminal proposed for the region. The initiative is using an innovative model developed by the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund, a law firm that specializes in this sort of radical experiment in local democracy. This is a huge step forward for community organizing. It directly addresses the systems of oppressive power that are destroying the planet.

This past January 24th the Santa Monica City Council unanimously approved a progressive sustainability bill of rights, building on the Santa Monica City Sustainability Plan first established back in 1994. The resolution calls on the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish”....The movement around recognizing rights of nature – that nature in all its life forms has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles – has been growing. A dozen townships in Pennsylvania, Maine, and New Hampshire have recognized rights of nature. And internationally, Ecuador and Bolivia granted legal rights of nature ordinances in their respective national constitutions.

Ecuador and Bolivia granted legal rights to the environment within the past few years. But what are those rights and can they really be enforced? "The rights of nature laws recognize the rights of ecosystems and natural communities to exist, to flourish, to regenerate, and to evolve," Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), told Discovery News. CELDF helped Ecuador write the rights of nature into legal reality. "The rights of nature laws move nature from being considered 'property' under the law to being recognized as 'rights bearing' under the law," said Margil. But laws are nothing but ink on paper if not enforced. A court case in Ecuador showed that these Earth friendly laws have claws and aren't just idealistic public relations legislation.

The City of Santa Monica recently passed an ordinance, directing the City to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities, and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish,” joining a rapidly growing international "Nature Rights" movement. "Nature Rights" recognizes that healthy ecosystems and biodiversity are critical to all life on the planet, including humans, and human priorities do not automatically take precedence over natural habitat and ecosystem health.

CITY HALL — A dual measure before the City Council Tuesday to support legal protections for the environment and end corporate personhood got a split response from elected officials who enthusiastically supported a healthy environment but watered down the call to restrict rights to living beings. Council members unanimously passed a resolution backing a bill of rights for the environment, which would give legal standing to city officials to protect the environment within Santa Monica's borders if passed as a law in the future.

Last Wednesday, Turkey’s Constitution Reconciliation Commission was presented with a new series of articles for inclusion in the country’s new constitution. Led by the Turkish Green Party, the articles were submitted by the Initiative for an Ecological Constitution (IEC), and prepared by environmental journalist Mahmut Boynudelik from notes he took at several recent Green Party conferences. If adopted, Turkey would have a constitution like no other in Europe or North America — but somewhat similar to the constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia, both of whose constitutions recognize legally binding rights of nature.

Individuals and community groups who are being assaulted by invasive corporations often make the mistake of contacting their state environmental agency or one of the nation’s major environmental groups for help, according to Thomas Linzey, executive director and co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. A state Department of Environmental Protection would seem like a logical place to call if the ecosystems in your community are under attack. According to Linzey, though, that’s not true and never has been.

Currently, U.S. state and federal law says that corporations don’t need community permission to drop pesticides overhead, or to site a toxic dump in town. We are told we cannot say “no” to the unwanted project because that would be a violation of the corporation’s Constitutional rights. We are also told that the ecosystems upon which we depend for survival are mere “property” under the law — human property to be owned and dominated, destroyed at will. But that is changing.

One of the world’s most diverse and pristine forests is at risk of dissipating, as it could soon fall into the hands of multinational oil companies come January 2012. Yasuní Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (Yasuní-ITT), a virtually untouched national park in the Ecuadorian Amazon, lies atop approximately one billion barrels of oil, worth up to $100 each, as well as hundreds of thousands of plant species that could be beneficial to the medical world.

CELDF’s Mari Margil interviewed on Rights of Nature. She was joined by Peter Burdon of Australia, who is part of our partnership within the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature

Lawyers have been called many things over the years, but “greenie” generally isn’t one of them. Yet with politicians hamstrung to address environmental problems, the legal profession is fast becoming our planet’s last line of defence. Once considered “comical”, the concept of legal rights for nature is finally being taken seriously, with the Chief Justice of the NSW Land and Environment Court attending a conference on the topic in Brisbane last month.

If a Santa Monica advisory task force gets its way, the city will join a growing panoply of municipalities on the forefront of a movement to cement the rights of its citizens to enjoy a clean environment. The ordinance, called the Sustainability Bill of Rights, would for the first time declare that Santa Monica residents, natural communities and ecosystems within city limits have a right to a healthy environment and conscious practices.

Under the emerging global legal movement known as “wild law”, things like the ocean are given rights. Australia's rivers, forests, ocean waters, flora and fauna should have their own legal rights, according to environmental experts meeting in Brisbane today. Lawyers, academics and researchers from across the world will gather at Griffith University to discuss this emerging global legal movement, known as “wild law”.

Ecuador is the only Andean nation without any large-scale metallic mines (such as gold and copper). This unique state of affairs is about to be tested in the next few weeks when the Correa government signs exploitation agreements with Chinese and Canadian transnational miners looking to exploit the country’s copper and gold reserves. More importantly, the legitimacy of the nation’s Constitution, which grants nature rights, will also be tested. There is no other economic activity in the world that would so clearly violate the rights of nature as large-scale open-pit mining. Large-scale mining, unlike petroleum, creates environmental liabilities that can endure for thousands of years. The impacts are order of magnitude worse.

Mountains, lakes, rivers and streams with legal representation? Animals and plants with their own ministry? It’s not a Gary Larson cartoon or a Yann Martel plotline – it’s a long overdue concept. In September of 2008, Ecuador passed a constitution granting rights to living things and their environment. “Nature has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” the document states. The Ecuadorian government must take “precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.”

An international coalition of academics and environmental activists has launched a global campaign for the creation of a new U.N. convention to protect "mother earth".

Two small countries of Latin America have been taking Mother Earth, or “Pachamama,” quite seriously so they have passed a series of laws to protect it, and their worries reached some concerned citizens in Turkey where there has been a vigorous debate going on for making a new, citizen-centered constitution.

Giving nature legal rights in a similar way as humans do may sound far fetched, but there are places around the world where this is becoming reality.

Hundreds of lawsuits have flowed from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, filed by citizens, states and the federal government. And someday, perhaps, the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystems will also file suit. Environmental philosophers and other people say that biological communities — ecosystems, habitats, species and populations — have a right to exist. They’re not just valuable because they’re someone’s property. Environmental lawyers say courts should recognize this right, and could allow people to represent nature as legal guardians or trustees.

A movement is brewing in the United States to recognize ecosystems as having the intrinsic right to exist. "Communities have come to a place where they realize the existing laws will not protect their resources,” said Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. She says it is time for a paradigm shift, and people need to think of natural resources as having legal rights.

This may be the first step toward the adoption of a Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. A companion piece to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, this emerging declaration - which would be backed by enforceable laws around the world - seeks to redefine our human relationship with all other species from one of dominance to one of harmony.

"The real issue here is that modern humanity looks at nature as a great big resource for our pleasure, profit and convenience, and we do whatever we want with it. We're in trouble," says Maude Barlow of our current relationship with the our natural world. She and Shannon Biggs have spearheaded the discussion over the legal rights of nature, a discussion that has gone all the way to United Nations, where arguments are now being heard.

Today the UN General Assembly will discuss implementing new international standards that afford rights and legal standing not just to individuals and businesses adversely affected by exploitation and damage to natural resources, but to nature and ecosystems themselves. Such standards have already been adopted as federal laws in Bolivia and Ecuador, as well as two dozen American municipalities. In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation in the world to rewrite their Constitution to include rights for nature to exist, flourish and evolve. In 2010, the city of Pittsburgh, PA asserted the rights of communities and nature over those of corporations when it passed a city ordinance banning the practice of "shale fracking" within city limits.

This Wednesday, in commemoration of Earth Day, and under the shadow of the one year anniversary of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf, the UN General Assembly will discuss implementing new international standards that afford rights and legal standing not just to individuals and businesses adversely affected by the exploitation and damage to natural resources, but to nature and ecosystems themselves. The discussion follows the adoption into law of similar protocols by over a dozen American municipalities as well as into the federal laws in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Today the UN General Assembly will discuss implementing new international standards that afford rights and legal standing not just to individuals and businesses adversely affected by the exploitation and damage to natural resources, but to nature and ecosystems themselves.... "Today's environmental laws place commerce above nature, and in so doing they legalize harm to ecosystems," said Shannon Biggs, Director of the Community Rights Program the NGO Global Exchange and author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots. "We see communities across the world, including in the United States, taking action to change this model in recognition of the Rights of Nature and to protect our environment, our communities and our future. This week's dialogue at the UN recognizes the Rights of Nature at another, important level."

In the wake of failure in Cancun and the much deeper problem that humanity is no longer living within the ecological capacity of the planet, might it be time for nature to have its own legal advocates? ...The reason why few are willing to look at the big picture is that admitting to this collision course between humanity and nature opens up a conversation that most of the world’s governments and corporations are desperate to avoid. They prefer to focus on greenhouse gas emissions, because it narrows the response to debating emission reduction techniques, instead of on transforming the economic, legal and political systems that encourage and legitimize environmental destruction.

The proposed declaration defines "Mother Earth" as "a living being, and...a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings"...

In this new report, CELDF's Mari Margil co-authors an article on Rights of Nature - exploring how past movements for rights - including the Abolitionists and Suffragists, organized to change illegitimate structures of law, and drawing lessons for today's emerging movement for Rights of Nature. Also read articles by members of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature on the Universal Declaration on the Right of Nature and what it means to recognize legally enforceable rights of ecosystems and natural communities.

Thousands of groups representing millions around the world protest the proposed enslavement of nature. Via Campesina farmers from 69 countries oppose 'false solutions to climate chaos... such as market-based proposals on carbon trading'. The Indigenous Environmental Network criticizes emissions trading of forests. "Nature has no price. Nature is our home... of which we form a part... it has infinite value."

Provisions in the ordinance eliminate corporate "personhood" rights within the city for corporations seeking to drill, and remove the ability of corporations to wield the Commerce and Contracts Clauses of the U.S. Constitution to override community decision-making. In addition, with adoption of the ordinance, Pittsburgh became the first city in the U.S. to recognize legally binding rights of nature. By recognizing the rights of nature, Pittsburgh is effectively protecting ecosystems and natural communities within the city from efforts by corporations to drill there--and by other levels of government to authorize that drilling. Residents of Pittsburgh are empowered by the ordinance to enforce those rights on behalf of threatened ecosystems.

As second-class citizens, our rights made secondary to the privileges of corporations, we look for solutions to the ignoble status we’ve been relegated to. Our work plays out within a very small box of “allowable activism” bounded on all sides by rights-frameworks which protect a relatively small number of corporate decisionmakers. What does this have to do with fracking in the Marcellus shale formation? Everything. The rationale behind the Pittsburgh ordinance is a simple one. If we respect and comply with those frameworks of law – playing within the sandbox that has been constructed for us - we’ll get drilled. It’s as straightforward as simple arithmetic.

A groundbreaking International Gathering for Rights of Nature was organized by The Pachamama Alliance and Fundación Pachamama in September, where conscious individuals and organizations who have worked to promote the recognition of Rights of Nature, met to expand this concept around the world. Out of this four-day meeting in Patate, Ecuador, the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature was formed.

Although it’s rarely said out loud, the regulators allow the energy corporations to write their own regulations — and when it becomes too expensive to comply with the regulations, the regulator simply exempts the corporations from them or the corporations simply rewrite the regulations to eliminate the added cost.

Now Ecuador has become the first nation on Earth to put the rights of nature in its constitution so that rivers and forests are not simply property but maintain their own right to flourish. Under these laws a citizen might file suit on behalf of an injured watershed, recognizing that its health is crucial to the common good. Other nations may follow Ecuador's lead. Just as legal systems once reeled to comprehend women or former slaves as fully entitled, law schools in the U.S. are now reforming their curricula with an eye to understanding and acknowledging nature's rights.

At a town meeting, residents voted, 114-66, to endow all of the town’s natural assets with legal rights: “Natural communities and ecosystems possess inalienable and fundamental rights to exist, flourish and naturally evolve within the Town of Shapleigh.”

Save for land in Antarctica, the terrestrial earth is entirely owned: Considered property, it has no rights of its own.

Ecuador's new constitution is a pioneering document that for the first time extends inalienable rights to nature.

In September, Ecuador vaulted to the forefront of international eco-politics when it became the first country to extend constitutional rights to nature.

This doctrine of human exceptionalism has been under assault in recent decades from many quarters.

Ecuadorians made history on Sept. 28 when they overwhelmingly voted to pass a new constitution which grants inalienable rights to nature.

ZURICH -- For years, Swiss scientists have blithely created genetically modified rice, corn and apples. But did they ever stop to consider just how humiliating such experiments may be to plants?

Something big has shifted in the environmental arena – and it isn’t a glacier or tectonic plate.

The constitution also grants nature the inalienable right "to exist, flourish, and evolve," giving the Ecuadoran government and its citizens the "duty and right" to file lawsuits for any damage done to ecosystems and natural communities.

On Sunday, two-thirds of the voters in Ecuador approved a new constitution that is the first in the world to recognize legally enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights.

Ecuador has become the first country to approve a constitution that, among other reforms, recognizes certain inalienable rights for nature.

But as I mentioned last week, the Constitution includes a novel set of articles that appear to be the first in any Constitution granting inalienable rights to nature.

Ecuador approved a new constitution this weekend that, among other things, grants inalienable rights to nature, the first such inclusion in a nation's constitution, according to Ecuadorian officials. "Nature ... where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions, and its processes in evolution. Every person, people, community, or nationality will be able to demand the recognition of rights for nature before the public bodies..."

Jaguars, spectacled bears, brown-headed spider monkeys, and plate-billed mountain toucans may all just breathe a little easier next week if Ecuadorians approve a new constitution in a referendum on Sunday that would grant these threatened animals' habitats with inalienable rights.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sept. 28 -- Ecuadorans approved by a wide margin Sunday a new constitution that would expand the powers of President Rafael Correa and open the possibility that he could serve a decade in office.

People will be asked to vote on Sunday on a new constitution that would give Ecuador's tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans.

Legal rights for nature is an idea that has been around for at least 35 years, and since Tamaqua’s action, other municipalities in Pennsylvania have passed similar ordinances, partly in an effort to change the way humanity treats nature. Now Ecuador is considering the adoption of such a law nationally. These laws grant ecosystems “standing,” a legal term that means people can sue on their behalf if their right to exist is threatened.

This month, Ecuador will hold the world's first constitutional referendum in which voters will decide, among many other reforms, whether to endow nature with certain unalienable rights.

With global warming waking up even those previously in deep denial about the dire state of the environment, the embrace of wild law may be the next paradigm shift. And if that shift comes within the next ten years (scientists warn that we have ten years to change our ways or our destruction of the planet will become irreversible), humans and the planet may actually have a chance.

"People have had the veil ripped away from their eyes," says Linzey. "They're saying, ‘We thought the state was here to help us.'"

In “Trees,” Stone argued that courts should grant legal standing to guardians to represent the rights of nature, in much the same way as guardians are appointed to represent the rights of infants.

Working to further the idea that old-growth forests, piping plovers, mountain streams and all of nature have rights worthy of recognition in courtrooms, the Center for Earth Jurisprudence has just wrapped up its first academic year at two Catholic law schools.

"Abolitionists didn't form a slavery protection agency like the Environmental Protection Agency," Price said. "They challenged the unjust structure of the law."

HARDLY ANYONE noticed it, but one of the most important events of 2006 may prove to have been the passage of the Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance, a law enacted by the 7,000 brave souls who inhabit the community of Tamaqua, Penn.

Could 'wild laws' protecting all the Earth's community - including animals, plants, rivers and ecosystems - save our natural world?

TAMAQUA — The borough council discussed an ordinance Tuesday night that would grant individual rights to ecosystems, and possibly secede from state and federal government.