It is time
to stop thinking we must protect nature and recognize that as much as every other life form on Earth, we are nature.
Rights of Nature
We cannot separate ourselves from the water we drink, the food we eat or the air we breathe any more than we can care for just a single leaf on a tree. And yet, human law almost everywhere defines “nature” as property to be owned, commodified and destroyed at will for human profit. Most of the destruction of the Earth is sanctioned by law—from blowing the tops of mountains for coal; to fracturing the earth for oil and natural gas; to clear cutting the Amazon and displacing Indigenous communities. In so doing we are defying the Earth’s true laws that govern the planet’s life systems. Climate disruption is the direct result of human activities pushing beyond these very real limits.
We cannot separate ourselves from the water we drink, the food we eat or the air we breathe any more than we can care for just a single leaf on a tree. And yet, human law almost everywhere defines “nature” as property to be owned, commodified and destroyed at will for human profit. Most of the destruction of the Earth is sanctioned by law—from blowing the tops of mountains for coal; to fracturing the earth for oil and natural gas; to clear cutting the Amazon and displacing Indigenous communities. In so doing we are defying the Earth’s true laws that govern the planet’s life systems. Climate disruption is the direct result of human activities pushing beyond these very real limits.
Humanity has lived for hundreds of thousands of years with the understanding that we are part of the system of life in relationship with the other life forms and natural entities such as rivers, mountains, deserts, oceans, etc. It is only within the last several hundred years that humanity obtained the technologies to pollute and destroy what life needs to simply exist on our mother, the Earth. We are now at a point when it is time to choose how we are going to survive these the devastating harms these technologies have created and how we are to move forward in the best way to ensure that future generations survive. We believe that the Rights of Nature movement is a way forward that helps people think differently about how to live and support our life support system: Earth. During the World’s Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010, there were tens of thousands of Indigenous people and others who came together to write the Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth.
Movement Rights is also a founding member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.( hyperlink to: https://therightsofnature.org). At the invitation of our boardmember, Casey Camp Horinek we were honored to assist the Ponca Nation of Oklahoma become the first tribe in the US to recognize rights of nature and climate rights in law. To learn more about the rights of nature movement, please see our reports (hyperlink to our resource page).
