The Rights of Nature

The Rights of Nature movement is only a small crack in the dam, though that’s the way these things start – first some seepage, then erosion of the foundation, or a failure in the piping or the sinking and sliding of concrete, before nature finally has its way and the dam finally starts giving way, and then the reservoir returns to the original run of the river it was born to be.

We’ve written before about the legal movement to bestow legal rights on natural features (The Rights of Rivers), and it seems time for a quick update with a a new legal entity created in the United Kingdom and the application of an innovative framework in Canada.

First up is the River Wye (not to be confused with The River Why, a great book by the way) in the United Kingdom, which has been legally recognized as a living ecosystem with intrinsic rights.

In its Charter of Rights, the River Wye – which starts in mid Wales and runs to form part of the border between England and Wales – now has the following protections:

• The right to flow
• The right to biodiversity
• The right to be free from pollution
• The right to regenerate
• The right to be supported by a healthy catchment
• The right to representation.

You can read more about it here.

And this summer in the province of Quebec, the Municipal Council of Terrasse-Vaudreuil became the first municipality in the world to formally adopt the Universal Declaration of Tree Rights through a municipal resolution. The resolution recognizes trees as living entities deserving protection and identifies four locally defined rights concerning life, natural growth, integrity, and regeneration. Neither the Declaration nor the resolution confers legal personality, legal standing or an autonomous capacity to sue upon trees. The Declaration is an autonomous framework, distinct from legal-personhood models developed within certain Rights of Nature initiatives.

It’s a promising development that communities and countries are waking up and protecting that which can’t protect itself, especially when humans have been and continue to be rapacious in their consumption of our natural resources.

What will be truly interesting is when the river finds itself in court suing to protect its rights.  I hope nature has a great legal team when it does.

Godspeed, friends.

Russ

Note: Thanks to Ricardo Rey, author and initiator of the Universal Declaration of Tree Rights, for helping to ensure the accuracy of the portion of this article that deals with this framework, which has been amended from the original publication to reflect this.

🤔 Think About It

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” Rainer Maria Rilke

On Duality

I selected today's "Think About It" quote because it's on theme (rivers), but even more so as I was inspired by the words of Rilke that were sent to me by reader Joe Waters after he read last week's issue, which I'm sharing below.

The duality is what's important here – are you letting everything happen to you?– though for the cinephiles among us the movie in question was "Jojo Rabbit."

A note about my friend Joe: He has a "wicked awesome" newsletter, Selfish Giving. He helps companies and nonprofits forge strong and successful partnerships and is also a lover and grower of flowers, a man after my own heart.

💥 Quick Hits

• The civic hour – How to boost civic engagement? How about approaching it an hour at a time?
• AI and B Corps – How do B Corp values mesh with artificial intelligence? You can read this take on it published in Fast Company.
• Technology and children – It was fun to see my friend Sunny Liu, director of research at the Stanford Social Media Lab, quoted in this story from The74, which uses the movie Toy Story 5 to illustrate technology's threat to human connection.

🥵 It's Getting Hot, Hot, Hot

As we're midway through the Dog Days of Summer, I thought I'd end this issue with a little dark comedy of the climate change variety. Can you relate?