Welsh Rights of Nature

An Old Relationship in a New Language

Rights of Nature is often presented as a new environmental idea: a movement seeking to recognise rivers, forests, mountains and ecosystems as possessing interests, and sometimes legal rights, of their own.

In Wales, however, some of the deeper philosophical ideas behind Rights of Nature have intriguing resonances with a much older cultural inheritance.

Medieval Welsh literature repeatedly portrays a world in which humans, animals, trees, rivers, mountains and the Otherworld exist within networks of relationship.

Nature is not always merely the background against which human affairs take place.

It can possess presence, significance and sometimes agency.

This does not mean that medieval Welsh society possessed a modern legal concept of Rights of Nature. It did not.

But these traditions can help us explore something equally important: a relational ontology in which people and the more-than-human world cannot always be neatly separated.

What is Relational Ontology?

Modern Western thought has often divided the world into categories:

Human and nature.

Culture and environment.

Subject and object.

Owner and property.

A relational ontology begins somewhere different.

Instead of assuming that beings exist first as separate entities which subsequently enter into relationships, it understands identity and existence as being constituted, at least partly, through relationships.

A person belongs to a family, community and place.

A river exists through relationships between water, geology, rainfall, plants, animals and the people living beside it.

A woodland is not merely a collection of individual trees but a community of relationships.

From this perspective, the question is no longer simply:

"What is this?"

but also:

"To whom and to what is this related?"

This provides a particularly interesting way of approaching both Welsh cultural traditions and contemporary Rights of Nature.

The Relational Landscape of Medieval Wales

Medieval Welsh literature preserves a world in which boundaries between human society and the more-than-human world can be remarkably permeable.

Animals speak or possess knowledge.

People undergo transformation.

Landscapes contain memories and identities.

Rivers and wells mark encounters between worlds.

Forests can be places of danger, revelation and transformation.

The Otherworld is not necessarily located in some entirely separate universe. It can be encountered through particular places within the landscape.

Such literature should not be treated as straightforward evidence of what every medieval Welsh person believed.

Literary texts are complex creations.

Nevertheless, they preserve ways of imagining the world that differ markedly from a landscape understood simply as passive property.

The Mabinogi and the More-than-Human World

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi provide some of the richest examples.

Throughout these narratives, relationships between humans, animals, landscape and the Otherworld are fluid.

Animals are frequently more than resources.

They can be guides, signs, agents or participants in events.

Human beings themselves may cross the boundary between human and animal existence.

Landscapes are not neutral settings. Particular places provide the conditions through which encounters, transformations and relationships become possible.

The stories therefore describe a world in which human society is embedded within a much wider field of beings and powers.

That makes the Mabinogi especially interesting when viewed through the lens of relational ontology.

Culhwch and Olwen: Knowledge Belongs to More Than Humans

Culhwch and Olwen provides another extraordinary example.

During the search for Mabon, knowledge is sought from a succession of ancient animals.

The Blackbird of Cilgwri, the Stag of Rhedynfre, the Owl of Cwm Cawl, the Eagle of Gwernabwy and eventually the Salmon of Llyn Llyw become participants in a chain of memory.

The animals possess knowledge unavailable to humans.

Age, memory and authority are therefore distributed across species.

This is a striking reversal of a purely anthropocentric worldview.

Humans do not possess all knowledge.

They must ask the more-than-human world.

For contemporary Rights of Nature, the parallel is compelling.

If we wish to understand the health of a river, woodland or ecosystem, we too must learn to listen to what other species and ecological processes are telling us.

The Battle of the Trees

The medieval Welsh poem Cad Goddeu — The Battle of the Trees, preserved in the Book of Taliesin, provides one of the most evocative examples of an animated natural world.

Trees and plants become participants within the action rather than passive scenery.

Alder, willow, oak, holly and other trees acquire identities and characteristics within a poetic landscape in which distinctions between human, natural and supernatural agency are unstable.

It would be misleading to describe Cad Goddeu as a medieval Rights of Nature manifesto.

But it does provide a remarkable literary image of a world in which trees are participants rather than objects.

That distinction is central to relational thinking.

Taliesin and Transformation

The traditions surrounding Taliesin provide another dimension.

Transformation, inspiration and knowledge repeatedly cross boundaries that modern thought tends to keep separate.

Human, animal and elemental forms participate within sequences of transformation.

Identity becomes relational and mutable rather than completely fixed.

The importance of these traditions for Rights of Nature lies not in attempting to turn medieval poetry into environmental legislation, but in recognising that Welsh culture contains imaginative resources for thinking beyond a rigid separation of humanity and nature.

Rivers, Wells and Living Places

Welsh tradition is also rich in stories associated with rivers, lakes, springs and holy wells.

Water is rarely significant only as a commodity.

It can mark boundaries, provide healing, carry memory, connect communities and become associated with saints, spirits and stories.

A river understood only in terms of drainage, abstraction or flood management is very different from a river understood as part of the identity of a place.

Rights of Nature asks us to recover something of that wider perspective.

A river is simultaneously water, habitat, geological process, ecological corridor, cultural landscape and community of life.

From Relational Ontology to Rights of Nature

There is an important difference between saying:

"Nature is important to us."

and saying:

"We exist in relationship with nature."

The first can remain anthropocentric.

Nature matters because humans value it.

The second makes a deeper claim.

Human wellbeing and ecological wellbeing cannot ultimately be separated because humans themselves participate within ecological relationships.

This is where relational ontology and Rights of Nature meet.

Rights of Nature translates relationship into responsibility.

If a river is understood as a living ecological community rather than merely a resource, we begin to ask what the river requires in order to flourish.

If a woodland is a community rather than simply timber or development land, its ecological integrity acquires significance of its own.

A Distinctively Welsh Rights of Nature?

Wales need not simply copy Rights of Nature models developed elsewhere.

There is an opportunity to develop an approach grounded in the particular ecology, culture, language, literature and communities of Wales.

Such an approach could draw together:

• contemporary ecological science;

• Welsh environmental law and policy;

• citizen science;

• community guardianship;

• the Welsh language and concepts of place;

• medieval and later Welsh literature;

• local knowledge;

• spiritual and cultural relationships with landscape; and

• contemporary Rights of Nature thinking.

The result would not be an attempt to recreate medieval Wales.

Nor should medieval literature be romanticised as evidence of an environmentally harmonious past.

Rather, it would recognise that Welsh culture contains intellectual and imaginative resources with which to question the modern assumption that nature is principally property.

Cynefin: Belonging to Place

One particularly powerful Welsh concept is cynefin.

It is difficult to capture fully in a single English word.

Cynefin can convey habitat, locality, accustomed place and a sense of belonging that emerges through familiarity with one's surroundings.

Importantly, the Welsh word is not confined to humans. It can also describe the habitat or familiar territory of animals.

That makes it especially suggestive for Rights of Nature.

Cynefin invites us to think not simply about a place that belongs to us, but about the places to which beings belong.

A river is cynefin.

A woodland is cynefin.

A hedgerow can be cynefin.

And humans share these places with countless other forms of life.

Guardianship in a Welsh Context

A Welsh approach to Rights of Nature can therefore emphasise guardianship rather than ownership.

Nature Guardians can watch over rivers, woodlands, meadows and other habitats.

Citizen science can document their ecological condition.

Children can learn to recognise the species with whom they share their cynefin.

Communities can ensure that nature's interests are considered when local decisions are made.

This transforms Rights of Nature from an abstract legal philosophy into a relationship with actual places.

Cwmaman: Putting the Idea into Practice

The Cwmaman Rights of Nature Charter, adopted by Cwmaman Town Council in June 2026, provides an opportunity to explore these principles at community level.

Here Rights of Nature is not concerned with an abstract wilderness somewhere else.

It concerns the River Amman, its tributaries, woodlands, rhos pasture, hedgerows, parks, wildlife and the everyday landscapes of Garnant and Glanamman.

Nature Guardians, habitat monitoring and citizen science provide ways of translating recognition into practical responsibility.

The Charter therefore asks a profoundly local question:

What would it mean for a Welsh community to recognise itself as part of — rather than simply occupying — its living landscape?

An Old Conversation Renewed

Rights of Nature is a modern expression, but the questions it raises are much older.

What is the relationship between people and place?

Does the more-than-human world possess agency?

Do humans alone possess knowledge?

What obligations arise from belonging to a landscape?

Medieval Welsh literature does not provide simple answers to these questions.

What it does provide is a rich imaginative world in which the boundaries between people, animals, landscape and the Otherworld are far less absolute than modern categories sometimes suggest.

Rights of Nature allows us to reopen that conversation in the twenty-first century.

Not by claiming that medieval Welsh literature anticipated modern environmental law, but by recognising within it a profoundly relational vision of existence.

Perhaps the starting point for a distinctively Welsh Rights of Nature is therefore not:

How can we give rights to nature?

but something more fundamental:

How can we rediscover our relationship with the living world to which we already belong?

CYNEFIN · RELATIONSHIP · RESPONSIBILITY · GUARDIANSHIP

A Welsh Rights of Nature can look forward while remembering an older understanding: people and place become meaningful through relationship.