We have passed laws to try to protect nature. We have made international agreements. We have tried to fit it into spreadsheets. But still the collapse of biodiversity, on these islands and around the world, continues.
That’s not just a disaster for nature, or a moral problem. It is a threat to all of our futures. Because we human animals are part of nature, entirely dependent for our lives on it, as is our economy.
A reset in our relationship within nature is clearly needed: as one Instagram supporter very beautifully put it, we need a Green Magna Carta.
The nature’s rights bill that I presented in the House of Lords on Friday 3 July, written by Mumta Ito of the Nature’s Rights charity, proposes that reset.
Currently we treat nature as an object of regulation, rather than as a rights-bearing subject. It is the latter that the bill establishes.
The product of years of consultation and thinking, the bill draws much international work, including at the United Nations through the Harmony with Nature programme.
Stronger protections needed for nature
For centuries, increasingly global Western models of thought have regarded humans as outside nature, superior to it, in control of it. That’s in conflict with wise indigenous thinking (this is something I focus on in my new book Green Thinking). Inspired by Maori philosophy, in New Zealand the Whanganui River was granted the right to flourish, in Ecuador sumak kawsay principles were used to underpin the rights of nature overall.
It is a natural progression to go further given the failure of previous efforts to protect biodiversity. The ecosystem services/economistic approach – as represented by the Das Gupta report (a brave effort to find a way to protect nature in terms even the Treasury could understand) – seeks to value nature on a spreadsheet and hence defend it, but what happens if the numbers come out wrong? An ancient forest is irreplaceable: literally invaluable. Once the ecosystem is gone, it will take hundreds, if not thousands, of years to get to something similar. And involving the financial sector in nature will, as we’ve seen in so many other areas of public life, chiefly benefit the financial sector and its goal of short-term profit.
Sadly, the international legal 30×30 approach – to protect 30% of the earth for nature by 2030 – is also failing to deliver, even though the principle is sound, and entirely fitting with rights of nature. We need something stronger.
Nature’s rights and human interdependence
What’s unique about the approach in this UK bill is that, rather than economic and human rights being set against nature’s rights, it starts with understanding them as the foundation of human and economic rights. Rather than a Venn diagram of rights – in which we try to meet some (all too often a tiny fragment) of nature’s needs – the bill establishes human and economic rights within the overall nature’s rights framework.
The bill is also an act of education, of helping with unlearning the long-term disastrous idea that nature is there for humans to exploit and extract, an unlearning that has been fast spreading around the UK from the grassroots encounters with horribly degraded rivers, polluted seas, trashed soils.
A complement to regional activism
It is important to say that the bill does not represent an alternative to very strong local action (such as by the Friends of the Thames and West Sussex Rivers Trust), or declarations of the rights of rivers (on which the House of Commons Library recently wrote an excellent report), but rather it is complementary to them. Defending the rights of one river can only have limited impact on the microplastics and nanoplastic pollution that now covers the planet, the explosion of novel entity pollution that has far exceeded the planet’s limits; that demands broader action.
It is also entirely complementary with the campaign, of which I’m a member, to create an international offence of ecocide and calls to strengthen the rights of Antarctica to continue to exist as a healthy part of the cryosphere. And it fits very well with the One Health approach that acknowledges that human, animal and environmental health are all interdependent.
Formalising the rights of nature in the UK
This is a long bill – 59 pages setting out an entire framework for delivering nature’s rights with a strong focus on ensuring that decisions under the bill be democratically made, particularly respecting the rights of less advantaged human communities, and the rights of a wide range of species and ecosystems, not charismatic butterflies and cuddly otters.
As the House of Lords Library briefing on my bill notes, the current UK government has no stance on the rights of nature on the formal record. Two years ago, at the United Nations, the former Tory government caused international upset by vehemently opposing a motion from Bolivia on “living well in balance and harmony with Mother Earth and Mother Earth centric actions.” This included a passage on the rights of nature.
But we now have a Labour government, and we will hear for the first time whether it has moved on from that disastrous anthropocentric perspective. Its 2024 manifesto acknowledged that we are in a “nature emergency” and said it would tackle “the unforgiveable pollution of our rivers and seas… promote biodiversity and protect our landscapes and wildlife”. In the Nature’s Rights debate, Labour has the chance to acknowledge a place for nature not as a source for extraction, but as a place for the human and more-than-human to flourish.
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