Rights of Nature

Why Rights of Nature?

My interest in the Rights of Nature arose from two different stages of my research.

Initially, while researching Indigenous Sacred Natural Sites on the Tibetan Plateau, I was searching for legal mechanisms capable of recognising and protecting places that remained largely invisible within conventional conservation. This led me to explore Juristic Personhood as a means of recognising legal standing beyond individual human beings.

More recently, my work in Wales has focused upon a different challenge. Nature remains largely voiceless within contemporary systems of governance. It is still treated primarily as an object requiring management or protection rather than as a subject possessing intrinsic value and interests of its own. In this context, the Rights of Nature movement has emerged as a practical means of strengthening the recognition and protection of the natural world.

Juristic Personhood and Rights of Nature

Although frequently discussed together, Juristic Personhood and Rights of Nature are conceptually different.

Juristic Personhood concerns the legal recognition of an entity as a person capable of possessing legal standing. Rights of Nature concerns the recognition of rights belonging to nature itself. One addresses legal personality; the other addresses legal rights.

Both, however, challenge the assumption that only human beings can be recognised within legal systems.

Relational Ontologies

The language of rights belongs to Western jurisprudence. The relational ontologies that support and inform both Juristic Personhood and Rights of Nature do not.

Relational understandings of nature occur among many Indigenous peoples throughout the world and are also reflected within other cultural traditions, including medieval Welsh literature. Within these worldviews, humans exist within networks of reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world rather than standing apart from it.

Rights of Nature and Juristic Personhood therefore represent contemporary legal responses that can engage with these much older relational ways of understanding nature.

Rights of Nature in Wales

My recent work has focused on the practical application of Rights of Nature within Wales.

I became increasingly aware that nature lacks an effective voice within planning, environmental governance and public decision-making. Although numerous laws protect wildlife and habitats, nature itself rarely possesses standing or representation within those processes.

The adoption of Rights of Nature Charters by a growing number of local authorities demonstrated that this approach could provide an important interim mechanism for recognising nature's interests within contemporary governance. It was this realisation that led me to promote the development of Rights of Nature Charters in Wales.

Rights of Nature does not replace indigenous systems of Spiritual Governance. Rather, within societies where such systems no longer exist or lack legal recognition, it offers a practical legal and ethical framework through which nature can begin to recover both voice and standing.