Western jurisprudence conceives of individuals as atomistic actors that operate independently and are predominantly self-interested. In turn, a legal or juristic personality is understood as an entity other than a natural being that the law deems capable of upholding the rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person. This ideology, however, is problematic because it discounts the relationships that are vital for our effective functioning as individuals and, by extension, a worldview that sees humans as an integral part of a living network. Thus, the concept of environmental personhood subverts this paradigm by recognizing nature as a living and sustaining force that must be honoured, respected, and protected—not owned, exploited, and profited from.
One embodiment of this worldview is the budding grassroots legal movement for the rights of rivers. Natural entities have traditionally been treated as legal objects with no rights or powers of their own, and in most places, when rights are attributed to nature, they are framed through the prism of human rights. Environmental personhood challenges this by emphasizing that environmental beings have intrinsic worth beyond their impact on humanity; it is not that people have a right to clean water, but that the water has a right to be clean. The modern idea of legal personality and environmental personhood most famously arose from Christopher Stone’s work in 1972. He argued that an object is a thing, “less than a person” in both moral weight and legal power and that the recognition of legal personhood is an opportunity to remedy this disparity.
The nature/human duality foregrounds a specific cultural framing in which agency has mistakenly become exclusive to humans, consequently excising non-human agency from what constitutes a society. This tradition of dominion and disconnection has effectively served as the basis for Euro-Western understandings of the world—contributing to an exclusionary relationship with nature. In settler-colonial states, this conceptual framing of the world, alongside the invasion and theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands, has aided in the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ ongoing effort in preserving our relationship with lands and waters. It has also aided in the erasure of Indigenous cosmologies, which acknowledge that all elements of nature possess agency.
In thinking of decolonizing water, we must understand that we are in relationship with water and that there exists a duality in how water is a source of life but can also take life. Water ultimately has its own agency and decision making; therefore, we must distinguish that in taking up this responsibility, it is not one of control of ownership or jurisdiction over water, but rather a relationship to and with water.
Today, at least three rivers worldwide hold legal standing on their own or legally enforceable rights akin to those of humans or corporations. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to amend its constitution to include the specific rights of nature, recognizing nature as a legal entity with the rights “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions and its processes in evolution.” In 2011, these rights were tested concerning the Vilcabamba River, which suffered riverside and waterflow degradation after a three-year road-widening project. In the end, the river, defending its own rights as the plaintiff, won a judgment from the Provincial Court of Justice of Loja, which ordered the river to be restored.
In 2017, New Zealand followed suit in one of the most significant shifts thus far by declaring the Whanganui River a full legal person, recognized under the name Te Awa Tupua—river with ancestral power. This decision was part of a negotiated settlement between the government and the Maori people, signalling the end of litigation dating back to the 1870s. While no lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the river since harming the river is effectively tantamount to harming the tribe itself.
Just months following the Whanganui River victory, Colombia’s Constitutional Court similarly recognized the Atrato River as a legal person “subject to the rights that implicate its protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.” This case was ignited by the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities affected by the illegal mines linked to mercury and cyanide contamination along its banks. It was ultimately found that the state authorities had failed to comply with their constitutional obligations, thereby causing an urgent humanitarian and environmental crisis in the river basin of the Atrato River and its surrounding territories. The Court thus decided that the authorities were “responsible for violating the fundamental rights to life, health, water, food security, a healthy environment, and of the culture and territory of the ethnic communities.”
Most recently, in February 2021, the Magpie (Muteshekau-Shipu) River in Quebec joined this global movement as the first of its kind in Canada. Winding approximately 200 kilometres before emptying into the St. Lawrence, the Magpie River is an internationally renowned white-water rafting site. However, the Innu and other First Nations, alongside municipal governments and environmental groups, have been working to protect the river from prospective hydroelectric developments for the past ten years. These efforts came to a head after New Zealand’s triumph in 2017, prompting the local municipality of Minganie and the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit to catalyze the creation of the nine rights established today. Specifically, the Magpie River has the right to live, exist and flow, be preserved and protected, and take legal action.
The last several years have seen numerous significant developments for the rights of rivers. Still, as the concept of environmental personhood suffuses the mainstream of legal thought, it is important to recognize that the ‘rights of nature’ expressed in state settler law have been consistently influenced and led by Indigenous peoples. While they may attempt to embody the laws and cultural protocols of Indigenous peoples, they are by and large a Euro-Western interpretation of Indigenous laws and cultural protocols and often only a weak form of legal pluralism.
That is to say, a sincerely transformative and pluralist ecological jurisprudence can only be achieved by enabling and empowering Indigenous legal agency—using Indigenous legal frameworks and validation of their own legal mechanisms rather than gleaning validation from state legislation, colonial courts, or government. Still, in the face of rapid anthropogenic changes, there exists an acute central value to environmental personhood and environmental rights: they help build international legal norms and the political will for collective solutions to global problems.
As more legal precedent emerges, the effectiveness of these changes will ultimately depend on a broader cultural shift, without which the enforcement of a rights-based framework for protecting nature cannot occur. This approach normalizes social imaginings that surpass the boundaries of existing cultural limitations and legal systems and, consequently, a world where our relationship extends beyond pragmatic use, academic understanding, or aesthetic appreciation.
Reimagining Personhood
Western jurisprudence conceives of individuals as atomistic actors that operate independently and are predominantly self-interested. In turn, a legal or juristic personality is understood as an entity other than a natural being that the law deems capable of upholding the rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person. This ideology, however, is problematic because it discounts the relationships that are vital for our effective functioning as individuals and, by extension, a worldview that sees humans as an integral part of a living network. Thus, the concept of environmental personhood subverts this paradigm by recognizing nature as a living and sustaining force that must be honoured, respected, and protected—not owned, exploited, and profited from.
One embodiment of this worldview is the budding grassroots legal movement for the rights of rivers. Natural entities have traditionally been treated as legal objects with no rights or powers of their own, and in most places, when rights are attributed to nature, they are framed through the prism of human rights. Environmental personhood challenges this by emphasizing that environmental beings have intrinsic worth beyond their impact on humanity; it is not that people have a right to clean water, but that the water has a right to be clean. The modern idea of legal personality and environmental personhood most famously arose from Christopher Stone’s work in 1972. He argued that an object is a thing, “less than a person” in both moral weight and legal power and that the recognition of legal personhood is an opportunity to remedy this disparity.
The nature/human duality foregrounds a specific cultural framing in which agency has mistakenly become exclusive to humans, consequently excising non-human agency from what constitutes a society. This tradition of dominion and disconnection has effectively served as the basis for Euro-Western understandings of the world—contributing to an exclusionary relationship with nature. In settler-colonial states, this conceptual framing of the world, alongside the invasion and theft of Indigenous peoples’ lands, has aided in the erasure of Indigenous peoples’ ongoing effort in preserving our relationship with lands and waters. It has also aided in the erasure of Indigenous cosmologies, which acknowledge that all elements of nature possess agency.
In thinking of decolonizing water, we must understand that we are in relationship with water and that there exists a duality in how water is a source of life but can also take life. Water ultimately has its own agency and decision making; therefore, we must distinguish that in taking up this responsibility, it is not one of control of ownership or jurisdiction over water, but rather a relationship to and with water.
Today, at least three rivers worldwide hold legal standing on their own or legally enforceable rights akin to those of humans or corporations. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to amend its constitution to include the specific rights of nature, recognizing nature as a legal entity with the rights “to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structures, functions and its processes in evolution.” In 2011, these rights were tested concerning the Vilcabamba River, which suffered riverside and waterflow degradation after a three-year road-widening project. In the end, the river, defending its own rights as the plaintiff, won a judgment from the Provincial Court of Justice of Loja, which ordered the river to be restored.
In 2017, New Zealand followed suit in one of the most significant shifts thus far by declaring the Whanganui River a full legal person, recognized under the name Te Awa Tupua—river with ancestral power. This decision was part of a negotiated settlement between the government and the Maori people, signalling the end of litigation dating back to the 1870s. While no lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the river since harming the river is effectively tantamount to harming the tribe itself.
Just months following the Whanganui River victory, Colombia’s Constitutional Court similarly recognized the Atrato River as a legal person “subject to the rights that implicate its protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.” This case was ignited by the Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities affected by the illegal mines linked to mercury and cyanide contamination along its banks. It was ultimately found that the state authorities had failed to comply with their constitutional obligations, thereby causing an urgent humanitarian and environmental crisis in the river basin of the Atrato River and its surrounding territories. The Court thus decided that the authorities were “responsible for violating the fundamental rights to life, health, water, food security, a healthy environment, and of the culture and territory of the ethnic communities.”
Most recently, in February 2021, the Magpie (Muteshekau-Shipu) River in Quebec joined this global movement as the first of its kind in Canada. Winding approximately 200 kilometres before emptying into the St. Lawrence, the Magpie River is an internationally renowned white-water rafting site. However, the Innu and other First Nations, alongside municipal governments and environmental groups, have been working to protect the river from prospective hydroelectric developments for the past ten years. These efforts came to a head after New Zealand’s triumph in 2017, prompting the local municipality of Minganie and the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit to catalyze the creation of the nine rights established today. Specifically, the Magpie River has the right to live, exist and flow, be preserved and protected, and take legal action.
The last several years have seen numerous significant developments for the rights of rivers. Still, as the concept of environmental personhood suffuses the mainstream of legal thought, it is important to recognize that the ‘rights of nature’ expressed in state settler law have been consistently influenced and led by Indigenous peoples. While they may attempt to embody the laws and cultural protocols of Indigenous peoples, they are by and large a Euro-Western interpretation of Indigenous laws and cultural protocols and often only a weak form of legal pluralism.
That is to say, a sincerely transformative and pluralist ecological jurisprudence can only be achieved by enabling and empowering Indigenous legal agency—using Indigenous legal frameworks and validation of their own legal mechanisms rather than gleaning validation from state legislation, colonial courts, or government. Still, in the face of rapid anthropogenic changes, there exists an acute central value to environmental personhood and environmental rights: they help build international legal norms and the political will for collective solutions to global problems.
As more legal precedent emerges, the effectiveness of these changes will ultimately depend on a broader cultural shift, without which the enforcement of a rights-based framework for protecting nature cannot occur. This approach normalizes social imaginings that surpass the boundaries of existing cultural limitations and legal systems and, consequently, a world where our relationship extends beyond pragmatic use, academic understanding, or aesthetic appreciation.
