Rights of Nature: A Reading List

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.

The texts in this reading list explore the contours of this space. Some trace the history of RoN, highlighting key moments and ideas. Others introduce different RoN formulations. Some critically examine core concepts including indigeneity and rights. Others profile adjacent work buttressing RoN and opening up new directions. Together these articles interrogate RoN’s potential to transform our legal, political, and cultural relationship with the rest of nature.

David R. Boyd, “Recognizing the Rights of Nature: Lofty Rhetoric or Legal Revolution?” Natural Resources & Environment, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2018): 13-17

This article presents a succinct summary of the international evolution of RoN. Starting with local ordinances in the United States, Boyd traces RoN initiatives through Ecuador’s groundbreaking 2008 constitution (still the world’s only constitutional RoN at the national level); New Zealand’s unique legal experiments with river personhood and land self-ownership; and a raft of other global grassroots initiatives, finishing with reflections on cross-pollination between different models.

César Rodríguez-Gravito, More-Than-Human Rights: Law, Science, and Storytelling Beyond Anthropocentrism? (NYU MOTH Project, 2024)

The More Than Human Life (MOTH) project is arguably the most culturally prominent RoN initiative. As this wide-ranging anthology demonstrates, MOTH frames itself as part of a broader ecological turn through which various disciplines recognize the agency and entanglement of non-human life. Covering the many facets of MOTH’s work—from deep philosophical inquiry to practical legal advocacy and creative storytelling—it’s essential reading for anybody interested in the current shape of the field.

Craig M. Kauffman and Pamela L. Martin, The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future (MIT Press Direct, 2021)

This book offers the most authoritative analysis of the nuts-and-bolts politics involved in embedding RoN. After surveying the evolution of RoN worldwide, Kauffman and Martin use in-depth case studies to analyze the structure and knowledge flows of the global RoN network, the ways domestic political systems and dynamics shape RoN models, and lessons for the movement moving forward. It’s a vital reminder that RoN are not just legal, but deeply political.

Mihnea Tănăsescu, “Chapter II: Rights Meet Nature” Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction (transcript Verlag, 2022): 19-46

Mihnea Tănăsescu’s Understanding the Rights of Nature: A Critical Introduction offers what’s arguably the best critical appraisal of RoN. Chapter two, entitled “Rights Meet Nature,” complicates the idea that the RoN movement started with and stems from Christopher Stone by tracing its “multiple and competing histories.” Tanasescu notes the diversity of Indigenous belief systems predating Stone, and a more moralistic and ecosystemic RoN lineage present in the work of Godofredo Stutzin, Thomas Berry, and Cormac Cullinan.

Tănăsescu urges sensitivity around keystone RoN concepts. He distinguishes between different types of rights (i.e. moral, legal, and political), justifications for rights, and political dynamics shaping rights discourse. He also discusses competing understandings of nature, noting how framing nature as a totalizing whole risks losing local nuances, as he writes: “Nature as totality has no politics, only theology; nature as place is nothing but politics.”

Ultimately Tănăsescu submits an important corrective to the idea that legal rights necessarily represent the best or only avenue for protecting nature. “The history of rights for nature as part of a rights expansion has no basis in empirical study,” he argues, “but is itself an inheritance of a way of arguing about morality and the law that is quintessentially Western and quintessentially part of a liberal tradition.” He reminds us to consider alternative forms of care and kinship that RoN discourse disguises.

Mauricio Guim and Michael A. Livermore, “Where Nature’s Rights Go Wrong” Virginia Law Review, Vol. 107, No. 7 (November 2021): 1347-1419

Turning a sympathetic but skeptical eye to RoN’s capacity to solve environmental problems, Mauricio Guim and Michael Livermore first chart the emergence of RoN and then identify conceptual problems underpinning the movement. In particular, they cite the challenge of balancing different nature rights, and of comparing the merits of different interventions without meaningful inter-subjectivity between humans and non-humans. They point to the piecemeal progress RoN have made through courts and argue that the real power of RoN may be in their symbolic call to cultural change. Finally, they propose that strengthening rights for humans working to protect nature may be a more effective strategy.

Atus Mariqueo-Russell, “Rights of Nature and the Precautionary Principle” RCC Perspectives, No. 6 (2017): 21-28

This short article by Atus Mariqueo-Russell argues that the precautionary principle (cited in Ecuador’s constitution) can provide justification for RoN laws. Further, it suggests that RoN can help us reframe the precautionary principle in less anthropocentric terms, in service of the ongoing flourishing of all nature.

Mihnea Tănăsescu, “Nature Advocacy and the Indigenous Symbol” Environmental Values, Vol. 24, No. 1 (February 2015): 105-122

RoN are often framed as a belated recognition of indigenous beliefs around animism, interspecies kinship, and ecological stewardship. But to what extent is this framing accurate and good for Indigenous communities? Tănăsescu scrutinizes “the indigenous symbol,” which he defines as “allusions to a fundamental relation between indigeneity and harmonious living with and within nature.”

Tănăsescu tells the story of Ecuador’s constitution, shaped with Indigenous communities, to demonstrate how rights can mistranslate Indigenous beliefs. Given that Indigenous Ecuadorian “ancestral beliefs were already based on the idea that nature is not a mere object but an active and often unpredictable subject, giving it rights is in a sense redundant for the indigenous imagination,” he writes. Indigenous support for RoN is best explained by the fact that the constitution offered a good enough translation of their beliefs, and an avenue to wider political recognition in a polity hitherto hostile to Indigenous ideas.

Tănăsescu argues that “the use of the indigenous symbol is not geared toward establishing facts about indigenous people, but rather toward advancing certain representational claims that the symbol can very aptly conceal”—namely the hegemony of liberal rights discourse. He identifies a number of problems with this, including the eclipsing of alternative indigenous-inspired forms of environmental care.

Steve Pavlik, “Should Trees Have Legal Standing in Indian Country?” Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring 2015): 7-28

Pavlik investigates the compatibility of rights discourse and Indigenous beliefs from a North American perspective. Wondering how legal standing might be put into stronger practice in the US, he turns to Native American philosophy and law as a space of potential. He quotes a fascinating range of contemporary native scholars to demonstrate how various tribal origin stories and belief systems allow for a version of non-human rights, and laments the suppression of traditional Indigenous governance systems capable of mobilizing such beliefs politically.

Guido Sprenger, “Can Animism Save the World?” Sociologus, Vol. 71, No. 1 (2021): 73-92

One of the most important cultural ideas underpinning RoN discussion and thinking is animism, which Sprenger defines as “cosmologies or ontologies that recognize life and sentience beyond biology, personhood beyond Homo sapiens, and sociality beyond humanity.”

In this exploration of animism’s environmental potential, Sprenger traces how it has been understood in the West and discusses whether it might challenge modern belief systems. He cautions against a simplistic understanding of animism as respect for all living beings, and warns that animism presents new dilemmas, like how to avoid constantly violating other beings’ rights. Referencing global examples, Sprenger finishes by proposing a model of animism that allows for shifting non-human personhood depending on social context.

Eduardo Mendieta, “Chapter 8: Interspecies Cosmopolitanism” The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (2024) 175-192

This chapter from a larger exploration into Western philosophy’s understanding of the human condition using ideas about other animals examines interspecies cosmopolitanism, understood as a process of world-building elevating cohabitation over exclusion and relationality over sameness or difference.

Mendieta identifies four historical ruptures that have undermined human exceptionalism: the discovery that Earth is not the center of the universe, evolutionary theory, Freud’s ideas about the subconscious, and the dawn of artificial intelligence. “We have ceased to be exceptional, but we also have ceased to be alone,” Mendieta writes.

Quoting Donna Haraway, Mendieta calls for us to subject ourselves “to the unsettling obligation of curiosity” about the duties and conditions of interspecies cohabitation. Drawing on Western political philosophy, he develops a conception of non-human (or natural) rights that avoids anthropocentrism.

Severine van Bommel and Susan Boonman-Berson, “Transforming Convivial Conservation: Towards More-Than-Human Participation in Research“ Conservation & Society, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2022): 136-145

In this overview of the convivial conservation movement, van Bommel and Boonman-Berson provide an example of RoN-adjacent work exploring the agency of non-human nature. “Conviviality, or living together, implies much more than the ‘coexistence’ of different ‘stakeholders’ in spatial proximity,” they write. “The concept of convivial conservation, if it is to be truly transformative, needs to fundamentally engage with the question of intersubjectivity of humans and all non-domesticated non-human beings.”

Focusing on affect, embodiment, and non-verbal communication, the article surveys how researchers are tackling the methodological challenges involved in understanding non-human subjectivities. Convivial conservation represents a wider cultural effort to learn how to listen to and understand non-humans, with the potential to shape future RoN.

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