Imagine a court hearing where the plaintiff is not a person, but a damaged river, lake or mountain.

That’s the vision of a movement of conservationists — gaining traction across the Continent — that believes granting basic legal rights to nature can help protect it from threats like deforestation, biodiversity loss, chemicals pollution and climate change.

“We usually think about nature as an object” that “serves us,” such as a swimming pool or a natural park, said Eduardo Salazar, a lawyer involved in the successful push to grant legal rights to Mar Menor, a large saltwater lagoon in Murcia in southeastern Spain polluted by the overuse of nitrogen fertilizers by nearby farmers.

Granting an ecosystem legal status on “the same level” as individuals can help alter social attitudes to nature, he said, and give it important new protections.

The lagoon last year became the first ecosystem on the Continent to be granted a status comparable to that of a person following a campaign backed by more than 600,000 people.

Activists are now trying to replicate the model elsewhere.

In Poland, a group of activists this week will complete the last leg of a 43-day-long march along the Oder River aimed at drawing attention to their campaign to grant the polluted ecosystem — which runs along the German-Polish border — the legal status of a person. 

After a massive die-off last summer killed thousands of fish in the Oder, campaigners fear the ecosystem may be headed for another ecological disaster, pointing to Poland’s failure to rein in industrial emissions that are thought to have contributed to the incident. 

“There is a lot of suffering going on in this river,” said Przemek Siewior, a climate activist who joined the march. Giving the fragile ecosystem legal rights is “a really good tool for people to try to save it,” he argued.

A ‘voice’ for nature

The so-called rights of nature movement, which originated in the United States some 50 years ago, has gained traction in recent years thanks to growing attention to the importance of protecting nature as part of combating climate change and biodiversity loss.

A growing number of countries — including Uganda, Ecuador and New Zealand — have laws granting ecosystems legal rights, and court rulings in India and Colombia have recognized such rights and stressed the government’s duty to protect it. Just last month, Panama gave rights to sea turtles in a bid to protect them against pollution and poaching. 

In Europe, campaigners are hoping to ride the coattails of the Mar Menor movement, with citizens’ initiatives pushing for similar recognition for the North Sea in the Netherlands and the Loire River in France, for example. 

At the movement’s core is a call for a fundamental rethink of the way people relate to and understand ecosystems. But more tangibly, campaigners also stress the importance of ensuring ecosystems can be represented in court.

In New Zealand, granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River was seen as a key step to ensure the Indigenous Māori community living in its vicinity gets more say on the health of the ecosystem. 

The Spanish law giving Mar Menor a right “to exist as an ecosystem and to evolve naturally” ensures it will be represented by a group of caretakers, made up of scientists, local politicians and citizens. 

Inspired by the Spanish example, the Oder River movement last month published a draft law to protect the ecosystem that would include establishing a 15-person committee to represent the river. Three would be appointed by the state, four by municipalities and eight by NGOs; a group of 10 scientists would advise the committee.

That structure would “give the Oder River a democratic representation” and a “voice that it currently just doesn’t have,” said Gaweł Andrzejewski, the coordinator of the Oder River march. 

The process is still in its early stages: Drafted by a lawyer in collaboration with civil society, the draft bill is mostly meant to “stir and start the conversation” with politicians and NGOs, said Andrzejewski.

Practical impact 

Critics argue that such representation is largely symbolic and doubt it can do much to help protect and restore ecosystems. 

Setting up committees to represent an ecosystem gives “power to particular people” to make decisions about what is or isn’t in its interest, said Michael Livermore, a professor of law at the University of Virginia who specializes in environmental law, among other topics.

But there’s no guarantee that they’ll make the right call, or that it’ll be heeded. “I think part of the issue with a legal right is that you still run into problems, like what’s best for an ecosystem? And who’s going to make that decision?” he said.

In Ecuador, for example, environmental activists challenged a large-scale mining project located in one of the most biodiversity-rich areas of the planet, saying it violated nature’s rights — but the court ruled against them, arguing that the government’s interests to exploit the resource were important enough to override the nature rights argument. 

Giving ecosystems legal status also does not guarantee protection — granting the Indian Ganges River legal personhood in 2017 has not prevented it from deteriorating, for example. 

Livermore argues there are more efficient alternatives to protecting nature, such as preserving people’s rights to organize, providing protections for environmental organizations or improving decision-making processes to give more power to Indigenous communities. 

Companies have so far remained relatively quiet on the movement — to Livermore, that’s a sign that giving rights to nature doesn’t pose much of a challenge.

“If it’s such a powerful tool to protect the environment, why don’t the special interests that worry about that, who would be opposed to very strong environmental protections, why aren’t they fighting it?” he said.