Western political and legal systems are founded on human exceptionalism: the idea that we stand apart from, with dominion over, the rest of nature. This has facilitated rampant environmental destruction. But the rights of nature (RoN) movement challenges this exceptionalism through a legal and cultural reimagining of how we relate to non-human (or more-than-human) nature. RoN refers to the practice of extending legal rights to non-humans, from animals to rivers, forests, and other ecosystems. RoN combine Western rights discourse with indigenous-inflected beliefs around animism and interspecies kinship.
In 1972, legal professor Christopher Stone wrote an article now often cited as the origin of the RoN movement. In “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone argues that nature should have legal standing to sue, and should be represented in court by humans. Various Indigenous cultures and state legal systems already allowed versions of Stone’s proposal, but his article shot to prominence when judge William O. Douglas cited it in a 1972 Supreme Court dissent. Questioning the decision to deny legal standing to the Sierra Club, which had sued the US Forest Service on environmental grounds for accepting a Walt Disney Company proposal for a major ski resort in California’s Mineral Valley, Douglas echoed Stone’s argument that nature itself should have standing to defend itself.
Today, thanks to a global network of lawyers, activists, Indigenous communities, philosophers, nature guardians, and academics, global RoN initiatives are increasing exponentially. This momentum has developed in step with a wider “ecological turn,” through which diverse disciplines recognize the agency and intelligence of non-human life.