Frequently Asked Questions

In the field of Earth law , an ecocentric approach encompasses an increasingly diverse range of legal protections for Nature and our fellow species. These include the Rights of Nature, Inherent Relationship Jurisprudence and other Indigenous legal models, human environmental rights, legal guardianships of Nature, rights of future generations, animal rights, and more.

In many countries, current environmental legislation has made great strides in banning the most toxic chemicals, reducing pollution, and setting aside reserves for wild Nature. However, increasingly urgent signs—climate change, species decline and extinction, pandemics amongst humans and non-human animals—are telling us that this progress isn’t enough. It’s time for the next evolution of environmental law, and helping to enact that paradigm shift is Earth Law Center’s mission.

Legal systems have always evolved, as evidenced by major shifts such as the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and marriage equality. They reflect growing awareness, shifting norms, and a shared commitment to justice and fairness.

Earth law focuses on creating a body of new law from an ecocentric view of Nature. Earth law encourages us to move away from “sustainable” damage as a legal standard to restoring ecosystem regeneration and balance, and to shift our view of other species from property to fellow members of the Earth community.

Fisheries are collapsing, forests shrinking, soils eroding, rangelands deteriorating, water tables falling, glaciers melting, sea levels rising, and species disappearing. The effects of climate change alone have been projected to cost the world economy $38 trillion per year by 2050. The economy cannot survive without an environment to support it.

Earth law seeks to restore balance by ensuring that our economy supports the overall health of the planet and all living beings who call Earth home, rather than treating ecosystems as expendable subsets of the economy.

Although Earth law has gained notoriety in western legal theory since the 1970s its roots lie in ancient and ongoing Indigenous legalities and worldviews that see humans and Nature as belonging to an interdependent community. In Ecuador, the Indigenous Quechua People know this worldview as "sumak kawsay,” which inspired the 2008 revised Ecuadorian constitution—the first national constitution in the world to include Rights of Nature. It reads, in part, "We . . . hereby decide to build a new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living."

Earth Law Center aims to catalyze a global movement to rebalance the human-Nature relationship. Although there is no way to be certain whether Earth law, or any other movement, will work quickly enough to avert the worst possibilities we face, we are fully committed to pursuing this direction with all possible haste.

Earth law is seeing an exponential curve of activity, with more wins happening and new precedents being set every year. Together, we can accelerate the rebalancing of the human-Nature relationship.

With Earth law in place, there will be times when Nature’s rights conflict with other rights, including human rights. The legal system has centuries of experience of resolving such problems because rights conflict happens all the time (e.g., tensions between religious rights and workplace rights).

The first step is to eliminate fake conflicts by asking if both sets of rights are supportable. A river may be able to supply a human population while retaining enough water for adequate flow. We can also ask if the conflict is real. In some cases, antagonists of the Rights of
Nature confuse desires, such as unlimited meat or access to golf courses, with rights.

The second step is to balance conflicted rights. With genuine conflict, the custom is to compromise, putting minimal restrictions on both sets of rights. This happens in human rights conflicts, with governing bodies deciding how to treat all parties fairly. Under Earth law, when balancing the rights of people and Nature, part of treating people fairly will be remembering that they need the environment in order to live.

Nature’s rights benefit human rights. Where the environment is harmed, people suffer from disease, violence, and land loss.  ELC has published two reports highlighting the deep connection between Nature’s rights violations and human rights violations.

People must enforce Nature’s rights. Governments and active citizens detect threats and bring issues to court. Guardianship bodies also have a role. For the Whanganui River in New Zealand, for example, the court has appointed guardians who have a responsibility to protect the River and act as its voice.*

Management boards comprised of court-appointed specialists can ensure that activities or proposed projects do not violate Nature’s rights. These boards aim for a holistic approach, weighing the costs and benefits to all affected parties and basing decisions on what is best for the whole.

Enforcement will become easier as communities increasingly act on their right to input into decisions affecting their environment.

* The Whanganui River court decision included a financial award which will pay for enforcement activities in the future.

Rights for dolphins capture the popular imagination because we recognize that they are smart. Rights for mice are less often called for.

But who decided that a certain level of cleverness earns a creature more rights? If rights depend on intelligence, are smarter humans more deserving of rights than others? Of course not. Earth law comes from a worldview that respects life for itself, grounds rights in the fundamental fact of aliveness, and does not apportion rights to humans and other creatures by what they can do.

As a leader in ecocentric law, Earth Law Center aims to explore, conceptually develop, and teach about the intersection of two legal fields—animal rights and the Rights of Nature. Whereas animal rights law has traditionally centered itself on the interests of individual nonhumans, Rights of Nature legal work has primarily addressed holistic ecosystem health, including the wellbeing of wild species. Historically, environmentalists and animal rights activists have failed to reach meaningful mutual understanding, even viewing each other with some hostility. Yet it seems clear that both groups could benefit from getting to know the other side. Rights of Nature has already provided a forum for this discussion to advance in meaningful ways, particularly in Latin America.

ELC works to explore synergies and differences between these perspectives to create a comprehensive legal framework to elevate both movements, separately and together.