Giving Rights to Nature: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, and PA Communities are Leading the Way

The movement to grant legal rights to nature has been a long time coming, with the idea first being floated in an article written by Christopher Stone in 1972. The theory remained mostly dormant for decades, until Tamaqua Borough in Schuylkill County, PA – just an hour north of Pendle Hill – became the first community on earth to grant legal protections to ecosystems in 2006.

Since that time, over three dozen communities in nine states across the US have recognized rights for the natural environment. The work has also spread internationally, with Ecuador recognizing rights for nature in that country’s national constitution in 2008. Bolivia, New Zealand, and India have also recognized rights for the natural environment. And in 2016, the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin added rights of nature to its tribal constitution.

And now, as the movement spreads into the courts and the streets in the US, two PA communities are again out front. In Grant Township, Indiana County, and Highland Township, Elk County, the Little Mahoning Watershed and the Crystal Spring Ecosystem, respectively, have filed to intervene in federal court cases that seek to prohibit frack waste dumping in those communities.

With climate change and habitat destruction increasing at terrifying rates, it’s imperative that we rethink our relationship to the natural world, including the legal and organizing tools we use to protect all life. Giving nature rights is a movement whose time has come.

Leader(s)

Chad Nicholson is the statewide Pennsylvania Organizer for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). He travels the state working with communities facing a range of industrial threats, e.g., defending two communities in federal court (including Grant Township) facing toxic injection wells; multiple communities pursuing Home Rule campaigns to increase community control over harmful corporate projects; and helping dozens of other communities fighting harms that range from corporate herbicide spraying to factory farms to sewage sludge spreading to fracking to massive energy corridors.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill. Click to view the flyer.