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I AM writing this from New York City, where 91av recently opened an office. I am an urban creature so I feel at home here, but green space is thin on the ground. There is Central Park but, unlike London, there are very few small patches of nature to offer respite from the pace of life in the epicentre of late-stage capitalism.

It is a little ironic, then, that New York is also one of the epicentres of a movement that could do much to challenge the hegemony of 21st-century corporations. Just up the road from here, at the City University of New York’s John Jay College are putting the intellectual meat on the bones of a growing movement called Rights Of Nature, which aims to grant fundamental legal entitlements to trees, rivers, ecosystems and so on that are similar to those we enjoy as humans – to exist, flourish, thrive and regenerate. The idea has been bubbling under for decades, but recently scored a big victory at the latest round of biodiversity negotiations, with almost 200 countries signing up to an agreement that recognises that nature can have rights.

For much of recent human history, nature has been regarded as mere property, a vast repository of resources to be exploited. That philosophy has driven the environmental destruction that has pushed us into the triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and waste and pollution. The rights of nature movement aims to end that exploitative relationship and replace it with a mutually respectful legal partnership between humans and nature.

This push was inspired by the harmonious and sustainable relationship between many Indigenous peoples and nature. It entered Western legal discourse in 1972, when Christopher Stone at the University of Southern California law school in Los Angeles published an article called . He acknowledged that this seemed fanciful, but wrote: “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment – indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”

, Stone’s vision was finally realised when the town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, banned the dumping of toxic waste on the grounds that it was a violation of nature’s rights. Until then, such activity could be stopped because it was illegal or violated a person or corporation’s rights, but nature itself had no rights not to be polluted. Dozens of municipalities in other US states followed suit, and continue to do so. In December, Gig Harbor in Washington decreed its have legal rights.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first national jurisdiction to recognise the rights of nature in its constitution; those rights were tested in court over a highway project that was dumping large amounts of rubble into the Vilcabamba river. Nature won. Since then, Bolivia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uganda and Panama have passed laws or amended their constitutions to recognise the rights of nature.

Such rights often succeed where regular environmental laws fail. In 2021, for example, Ecuador’s supreme court called a halt to exploratory mining in a protected area of rainforest called the Los Cedros Reserve. According to environmental lawyer at the University San Francisco de Quito, Ecuadorean environmental law allows it, but the country’s highest court ruled it violated the constitution. Nature doesn’t always win, but it wins more often than it used to.

The biggest victory so far came in December at the end of last year’s global biodiversity negotiations in Montreal, Canada, which set out to reach a consensus on how to protect wildlife up to 2030. The agreement that eventually emerged the rights of nature, saying that they will be an integral part of successful implementation.

Unfortunately, none of it is binding, and it is up to individual governments to implement this. But the resulting Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is the first international agreement to mention rights of nature. I think that makes it a watershed moment. Elizabeth Mrema, head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, hailed it as the biodiversity equivalent of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Cynics will point out that not one of the previous set of global biodiversity goals – the 20 Aichi Targets, which ran from 2010 to 2020 – was fully achieved, and that we are still on course to overshoot the Paris agreement’s 1.5°C target. Cynics have a point. But let’s not forget that many countries fail to fully implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet the world is still a better place because those rights exist.

Graham Lawton is a staff writer at 91av and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton