The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution for Ecological Justice
(2019) Taking Legal Actions on Behalf of Future Generations — ISBN: [9782807609051], accepted/in-press
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- Authors
Petel, Matthias 
- Abstract
- This contribution reflects on the potential impact of the rights of nature for ecological justice. First, we explain how the rights of nature can provoke a genuine shift from anthropocentric ethics to ecocentrism, from neoclassical economics to ecological economics and from legal appropriation to subjectivization. Secondly, we assess the influence of the rights of nature in the access to justice for environmental matters. We answer practical objections commonly raised by opponents of the idea. We then provide a few significant examples from around the world. This allows us to analyze the impact of those enactments as far as the access to justice is concerned, especially focusing on the legal standing issue. Thirdly, we claim that if this legal tool could be powerful, its effectiveness will very much depend on collective struggles and practices to offer a genuine alternative to the profit-driven paradigm based on private property. This is also why we cannot expect rights of nature, as powerful as they might become, to be a magical solution that will destroy our consumerist mentalities and our capitalistic structures. Rights of nature could remain toothless if not supported by human communities willing to fight for their present and future well-being. Therefore, the current crisis should not be framed as an opposition between humankind and nature or between human rights and nature rights. It should rather be understood as a struggle between communities fighting for their survival (and thus the protection of their land) against a shot-term profit-driven thinking that tends to reduce the living to a monetary value. Therefore, when mobilized by individuals gathering around protection of the ecosystems on which they rely, rights of nature are a tool for reconciling social justice and ecological integrity. We defend the idea of the recognition of the rights of nature as a powerful tool, not only to provoke a cultural change, but also to improve access to justice for the protection of ecosystems, the living beings of our planet, and future generations.
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Citations
Petel, M. (2019). The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution for Ecological Justice. In Emilie Gaillard and David Forman (ed.), Taking Legal Actions on Behalf of Future Generations. Peter Lang. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/222793