PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF NATURE.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: VOX POPULIST

As you might expect, corporate leaders have responded to the Rights of Nature movement--which seeks to fundamentally rethink the way humans interact with ecosystems, ensuring the natural world's freedom to flourish--with the same calm consideration and civil respect that they always give to any extension of democratic power. "Eeeeekkk," they shriek in unison. "The sky is falling!" If nature has rights, they argue, businesses and humans will have none.

"You can't do anything to the land," exclaimed one of their delirious lawyers. "You can't farm it, you can't put new roads in, you can't do any landscaping." None of this is true.

Profiteering industries and their political screechers are trying to demonize this strikingly sensible rights movement. It's an honest, pragmatic, effective, and popular alternative to today's status quo "regulatory" charade that basically serves and protects nature's violators. It is about the right of other creatures to exist and not be sickened with some corporation's chemical waste.

That's why the Rights of Nature idea has taken hold and why it is spreading rapidly worldwide. In little more than a decade, national parliaments, courts, and even constitutions in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nepal, India, New Zealand, and Uganda are incorporating the concept into their legal systems; campaigns are now underway to adopt versions of it in a dozen more nations.

And while mass media in the United States have generally ignored the remarkable adoption of this principle around the world, it has nonetheless quietly taken root across our own country. In addition to actions by various tribal nations (including the Ho-Chunk, Nez Perce, Ojibwe, and Yurok), more than three dozen U.S. communities have enacted enforceable Rights of Nature provisions. It's especially notable that this grassroots legal rebellion against the do-nothing system of environmental protection is not arising from predictable liberal enclaves, but mainly in working-class communities.

Consider Tamaqua, a small town in Pennsylvania coal country. In 2006, it enacted the world's first Rights of Nature ordinance. City council member Cathy Morelli was working with a growing group of locals outraged that their area had become "a sacrifice zone" for dumping toxic sludge and other industrial waste. Unsurprisingly, Tamaqua was suffering a devastating outbreak of rare, fatal cancers. Meanwhile, business and regulatory leaders insisted that tests...