What if rivers, meadows and forests were people?
Since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Citizens United, we’ve had to consider that non-human entities can be given rights defensible in court. While many fight to overturn the rule to rein in the influence of money in politics, environmentalists across the globe are waging a crusade in an opposite direction — that is, creating personhood status for natural resources.
The movement has begun in India and New Zealand, where personhood and the legal defense it implies recently was adopted for ecological entities like glaciers and rivers.
In recent events, the federal court of New Zealand and the high court of Uttarakhand, India recognized specific rivers as having rights that can be protected by law.
In New Zealand, in March 2017, a Maori tribe successfully petitioned that the Whanganui river is its kin because tribe members are all its ancestors. This win means the river qualifies for legal representation, as adults would defend an abused child.
Meanwhile in India, the ecological decline of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers, as well as the melting of the glaciers that feed them, has brought attention to the immense significance of the rivers to survival of the nation’s people. The rivers pass through 50 cities in India, and about half of its irrigated lands depend on this water.
This ruling of India’s high court to give personhood to these natural features of our planet not only protects these rivers in theory, but it also can apply to tributaries and lakes, as well as meadows and forests that depend on the water.
How lawyers will actually structure this defense is yet to be seen. But offering legal representation to nature is a precedent that invites more creativity for #SolutionsInSustainability.
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