Well, that’s a step in the right direction.
Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador:
CHAPTER ONE
Principles for the enforcement of rights
Article 10. Persons, communities, peoples, nations and communities are bearers of rights and shall enjoy the rights guaranteed to them in the Constitution and in international instruments.
Nature shall be the subject of those rights that the Constitution recognizes for it.
A cloud forest in northern Ecuador is protected from deforestation and mining after being recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood.
For more than 30 years, José DeCoux woke each morning to a deafening noise. In his home in Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest, monkeys squeal, squirrels scuffle, and 400 species of bird flit and squawk. A mist hangs in the trees, and ferns and mosses in countless shades of green cover every rock and tree trunk.
DeCoux moved to the Los Cedros reserve in northern Ecuador from the US in the 1980s. He was “sort of heeding the call to save the rainforest, or something”, he told BBC Future Planet with a smile in April.
With the help of friends and non-profits including Friends of the Earth Sweden and the Rainforest Information Center of Australia, DeCoux bought land in Los Cedros forest, and a conservation and eco-tourism project was born. DeCoux managed the reserve until his death in May, four years after being diagnosed with cancer.
Despite extensive deforestation in the surrounding region, Los Cedros’ 11,681 acres (4,800 ha) buzz and thrum with life. Its biodiversity is astonishing: more than 130 scientific papers have been published on the vast number of species that call Los Cedros home – from fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears. Most of the reserve is a cloud forest where the air is heavy with moisture from drenching rain and permanent condensation, which fosters blankets of lichen and strange orchids. Many species can’t be found anywhere else, such as the tiny orange Los Cedros rainfrog.
Life continues to thrive in Los Cedros, but its survival wasn’t always certain – and it is largely thanks to a powerful, and increasingly influential, global legal movement that the forest is still standing.
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to change its constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. The change was led by Ecuador’s Indigenous movement, and marked one of the first major steps in what has become known as the ‘rights of nature’ movement – a movement centred on a legal framework that recognises the inherent right of the natural world to the same protections as people and corporations.
The rights of nature movement “is a move to transform natural entities from objects to subjects, in courts and in front of the law”, says Jacqueline Gallant from New York University’s School of Law’s Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic. “But in a much broader sense, it’s been a movement to reanimate and recentre nature as a subject of intrinsic worth,” Gallant explains. This is in contrast, she says, to the Western view of nature as “an inanimate backdrop against which the drama of human activity unfolds”.
Inbred, feral, and hungry, the “cocaine hippos” of Colombia took to the rainforests after liberation from Pablo Escobar’s menagerie at the time of the drug kingpin’s death in 1993. From an initial population of four, the hippos are now a fast-growing nuisance numbering over 100. Yet they are also the stuff of legend and an obvious favorite in a popular culture ever in search of quirky, new animal mascots.
In part because of their singular fame, a symbolic impediment to treating them as a common invasive pest was introduced in October, when a U.S. judge recognized their status as “interested persons,” which at least (in principle) enables them to exercise their legal right to obtain information in a U.S. legal trial. This ruling is not enforceable in Colombia, but it is a milestone in U.S. law and pushes the idea that the Earth is a political community composed of all sorts of “persons”—only some of whom are human.
Escobar’s hippos are far from unique (at least with respect to their claim to personhood). Building upon his own 2010 article, “Legal Personhood and the Nonhuman Rights Project” (Animal Law 17/1), the philosopher and animal-rights activist Steven Wise has spearheaded a movement for animal freedom that has successfully used the writ of habeas corpus to secure it—a writ that generally presupposes of the entity whose freedom is being sought that it is a “person.” Following Wise’s strategy, in 2018 a group of philosophers wrote a brief in support of two captive chimpanzees, Tommy and Kiko, arguing that they “satisfy the criteria [for personhood] and are entitled to habeas corpusrelief.” As early as 2004, before the Nonhuman Rights Project had begun, a landmark case known as The Cetacean Community vs. George W. Bush asked an American court to decide whether marine mammals have the legal standing necessary to bring a suit in their own name. Again, the presumption is that such legal standing flows from personhood, even if until recent years this did not have to be made explicit, since the kind of persons brought before the court were consistently those we take to be paradigmatic: human beings.