12/08/2026
Something just happened in a small town in Canada that didn’t make headlines, but should have: Terrasse-Vaudreuil, a 2,000-person municipality west of Montreal, passed a law declaring that trees are living beings with their own legal rights.
Thanks to the new resolution, trees in the area have been granted “the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and regeneration.”
This is just the latest win in a worldwide push to enshrine nature with legal rights.
The global movement – recently coined as the “rights of nature movement” – directly challenges the twentieth-century notion that nature should be classified as a “resource” to be owned, used and degraded. Instead, proponents argue that nature should be granted its own set of legal rights – which would help ensure that humans are legally required to protect living ecosystems.
Terrasse-Vaudreuil is just one of the many hundreds of communities across the world that have recently passed laws granting legal rights to nature. Here’s a breakdown of why this movement is an important piece of the effort to build a better future – and how to get involved.
Corporations have rights – why not nature, too?
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Critics of the movement argue that granting nature rights is a “radical” attack on corporate liberties to develop land and extract resources. But what’s actually radical is our current approach: treating environmental destruction as a “cost of doing business,” instead of a direct threat to the livability of Earth.
Thanks to the capitalist logic of endless resource extraction in service of endless profit, we’ve breached seven of the nine planetary boundaries that keep Earth in a stable state where humanity can thrive. Our latest podcast episode with Johan Rockström is a primer on the current (dire) state of Earth’s ecological systems:
Meanwhile, in the USA, corporations are considered people – with the rights to free speech, privacy, religious freedoms, and in some cases, the right to vote. This is a radical way to operate society, especially when the very ecosystems that keep us alive – forests, rivers, lakes, soil, etc – don’t have the same rights. In the current legal paradigm, ecosystems are simply property for corporations own and use for profit.
Until now. The Rights of Nature movement is pushing to establish a new legal precedent – one that makes it illegal to harm the ecosystems current and future generations depend upon.
It’s important to note that Rights of Nature is a new movement inspired by old ideas. Many of the recent legal wins (documented below) are the result of leadership and organizing by Indigenous communities whose wisdom is embedded within these new legal frameworks. Indigenous groups have long understood that humans and nature should be in reciprocal relationship. What the Rights of Nature movement does is provide a legal mechanism to build toward this future.
“We can starve together or feast together. All flourishing is mutual.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer
Now the movement is gaining global momentum
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Today, nearly 700 initiatives across 66 countries are advancing legal protections for nature – for specific ecosystems, and for nature at large. Ecuador, Panama, and Bolivia have passed national laws protecting the rights of nature to exist and regenerate. The Mar Menor lagoon in Spain, Klamath River in California, Atrato River in Colombia, and Whanganui River in New Zealand have all been granted legal personhood. The state of Rhode Island approved a resolution in 2023 that recognized the rights of natural ecosystems. Last month, a rights of nature bill was introduced in the British Parliament by Natalie Bennett.
These legal wins are starting to translate to real ecological wins. Two years after Panama passed a national rights of nature law, its Supreme Court unanimously ruled the country’s largest copper mine unconstitutional – leading to the shutdown of a decades-long mining operation that degraded coastal rainforests, harmed Indigenous communities, and put endangered species at risk.
In 2021, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled in favor of Los Cedros Forest, voiding the permits for mining activities that were found to violate the forest’s right to exist and regenerate. Mining operations stopped a month after the ruling, protecting Los Cedros from further degradation and species extinction.
Legal protections aren’t always enough
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The movement has made big wins over the last couple decades, but not every legal win has turned into an ecological one. In 2010, Bolivia passed the world’s first Law of Rights of Mother Earth, ordering the creation of an environmental office to enforce these rights. Sixteen years later, the office still doesn’t exist, and the government has eased environmental standards in favor of mining, oil and gas drilling, and other development projects.
The US city of Toledo granted personhood to Lake Erie in 2019, after a toxic algal bloom left half a million people without access to drinking water. But shortly after, the Ohio legislature followed up with a law preventing local governments from regulating issues like rights of nature laws. A federal judge then struck down the law as unconstitutional, calling the rights “aspirational” and lacking in “practical meaning.”
Well-meaning critics of the movement have warned that nature’s rights are too vague to hold up in court, and that the movement is creating legal risk for any development project – including potentially desirable ones, like renewable energy buildout. Some also worry that these legal wins have generated backlash that’s harmed the broader environmental movement. And conservative states like Florida, Utah, and Idaho have already passed preemptive bans against future Rights of Nature legislation.
Then there’s Ecuador – the first country to grant nature constitutional rights – which has experienced continued environmental degradation from mining and oil expansion. The country’s current Trump-aligned administration has significantly weakened environmental protections and targeted activists; Indigenous land defender Efraín Fueres was even shot and killed by state security forces at a protest last September.
If the Rights of Nature movement hasn’t been able to stop such violence and extraction, what do these legal “wins” actually accomplish?
Why the movement is still essential – and what we can learn from it
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By our assessment, here’s the real takeaway: Political power is the factor that determines whether Rights of Nature legislation actually succeeds or fails. Symbolic wins may provide an opening for progress, but true success depends on whether those wins are backed by real people power.
The decision by the Panamanian Supreme Court to shut down the country’s largest copper mine was aided by Rights of Nature legislation, but the decision happened because the people of Panama filled the streets in weeks of nationwide protest. The Los Cedros cloud forest in Ecuador is thriving today not only because it has rights, but because communities filed lawsuit after lawsuit in defense of those rights.
In contrast, Bolivia’s Rights of Nature law hasn’t lived up to its expectations because the coalition that fought for the law fractured before it could enforce it, and the office meant to hold the government accountable was never staffed. Lake Erie’s personhood status was struck down because Ohio’s agricultural and industrial lobby captured the legislature.
These examples are versions of the same story: Grassroots communities fighting against corporate interests with deep pockets. These fights are complex, incredibly hard, and don’t always result in wins. But none of these setbacks are reasons to move away from granting nature legal protections. Rather, we must conclude that legal wins are just part of a larger political strategy that must include building power and shifting culture.
Shifting culture towards interconnectedness with nature is key to sustaining life on Earth for generations to come. When 62% of Ecuadorians recently voted to protect the rights of nature, they showed us how broad-based cultural respect for nature translates into durable political power.
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Michael Mezz writes about economics, climate, & culture and is the founder of Better Future Media & host of the Better Future podcast. Subscribe to Mezz on Substack for updates.
