Giving rights to rivers – Granting ‘legal personhood’ to nature!? UK government declares No Way! ‘It is a fundamental principle for the UK and one from which we cannot deviate’

Excerpt: Last week, a UK government delegate stood up at the UN and declared that the British government would never recognize that nature has rights. “It is a fundamental principle for the UK and one from which we cannot deviate,” he said, ruling out the notion that nature could be granted legal personhood, the mechanism that treats other non-human entities, such as companies, as a person for legal purposes.

Despite such a high-profile rejection, rights of nature campaigners have not lost hope. In fact, rather the opposite. “That the government even feels like it’s worth their time to come out and say they don’t like it, it’s a bit of a victory for the movement, [a sign] that we’re actually getting somewhere,” says Paul Powlesland.

Powlesland is one of the founders of Lawyers for Nature, a collective of legal experts and campaigners who work to protect the natural world and advocate for the rights of nature. While the UK government may have roundly rejected the notion, there are other legal avenues to pursue their cause, such as through local bylaws or declarations, as well as continued campaigning towards an eventual act of parliament.

“If you think about how your legal rights as a human are protected and upheld,” he says, “you’d be looking at hundreds, probably thousands of different legal provisions at all levels, from international, to national, to local, and through different systems. That’s what we need to replicate for nature.”

While this may sound like a daunting prospect, it’s not without precedent. The UN resolution being debated had been brought by Bolivia, one of a handful of countries including Ecuador, New Zealand, Mexico and Uganda that recognise the rights of nature at a national level, with others recognising it at local or state level.

Ecuador, which enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution in 2008, has developed one of the most advanced legal frameworks on the subject. Since its inclusion, rights of nature have been relied upon more than 50 times in various judicial decisions, many of which have prevented the destruction of natural ecosystems. These include the blocking of a copper mining project in the Tropical Andes, the world’s most biodiverse hotspot, and copper and gold mining concessions being withdrawn in the protected Los Cedros forest.

It is no coincidence that Ecuador is precedent-setting in this area, given the traditionally ecocentric beliefs held by its Indigenous people. But that does not mean that such a framework is completely out of reach for the UK. Closer to home, the Irish government is considering a national referendum on whether to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution, while New Zealand, which, Powlesland says, “has a legal system which is very similar to ours”, has granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River.

The difference in the latter case was the role played by Māori tribes who act as guardians for the Whanganui, fighting for the rights of their sacred river. “For me, the key role that we are lacking that countries with an Indigenous presence have is guardianship,” says Powlesland. “Humans acting as guardians, looking out for nature — usually local to them — that they love and acting in its interest.”

Slowly but surely, however, ordinary people in the UK are stepping up to take on this role. The scandal of sewage pollution has given rise to a number of local groups who have declared themselves stewards of the rivers they care about, with some yielding legislative victories. Last year, Lewes district council passed a rights of river motion regarding the River Ouse, with a charter now being developed to figure out how the rights will work in practice. The fact that more and more groups are stepping into that guardianship role within the current legal framework “feels like a very powerful agent for change,” says Powlesland.

Another way to encourage people to act as guardians for nature and fight for its legal rights is for them to truly understand what is at stake. Guy Shrubsole is one of the leading voices of the Right to Roam campaign, the movement calling for greater access rights to the land and rivers of England and Wales, of which only 8 per cent is publicly accessible.

“One way I think that we can start to give greater rights to nature is through more of us actually being involved in its defence,” he says, “observing what’s going on at a deeper level in the countryside. That, to us, is linked to access reform.” The two campaigns share the ideal of humans living as a part of the natural world, rather than treating it primarily as something to be exploited.

“The UK and England in particular has a very long history of treating the rest of the natural world as a form of property, as a resource,” says Shrubsole. “So overcoming that will be a very big step, but I think there are increasing numbers of people in Britain who are starting to articulate a different way of connecting to nature.”