Editor’s notes: “A Washington state city has granted part of the Snohomish River watershed legal rights that can be enforced in court. In nearly all cases, state legislatures heavily lobbied by commercial industries have preempted the laws, rendering them unenforceable. But the Everett initiative could be the first to withstand such a challenge. Democrats, typically more open to stronger environmental protections than Republicans, currently control Washington’s Legislature and governorship.”
Efforts to apply the rights of nature in Ecuador have often failed. Legal challenges can become highly politicised and there is little legal infrastructure beyond general constitutional principles.
For example, in a case brought after road builders had dumped material into the Vilcabamba River, plaintiffs claimed to represent nature in court. However, they were not genuinely advocating for the river’s rights – their main concern was protecting their downstream property.
Ultimately, defending the rights of nature in court will be a struggle if the nature in question – the river, forest or lake – is not represented by someone with an ecocentric perspective. That means prioritising the intrinsic value of nature itself, rather than focusing on how it can serve human interests.
“According to the third Kawa, the people and the river are intrinsically linked, so Te Awa Tupua isn’t merely the river but also includes the surrounding communities — which challenges Western notions of property and human-made law. The relationship between the Iwi and the river goes beyond mere geographical proximity and includes spiritual and affective care for each other.”
Biodiversity is declining at rates unprecedented in human history. This suggests the ways we currently use to manage our natural environment are failing.
Many Indigenous peoples have long emphasised the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, the late University of Southern California law professor Christopher Stone proposed what then seemed like a whimsical idea: to vest legal rights in natural objects to allow a shift from an anthropocentric to an intrinsic worldview.
Here’s what you need to know about one of the fastest-growing environmental and social movements worldwide—to secure legal rights for ecosystems and other parts of the natural world.
By Katie Surma
April 2, 2025
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
“Rights of nature” is a movement aimed at advancing the understanding that ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.
Legal rights are the highest form of protection in most governance systems. In the United States, humans and non-humans have enforceable legal rights, like corporations’ right to freedom of speech.
At the same time, most legal systems treat nature as rightless property that humans can own, use and destroy. That means the law views sentient species like elephants and bald eagles, as well as life-supporting ecosystems like forests and coral reefs, no differently than objects like microwaves or cars.
For the people behind the rights of nature movement, that way of thinking is deeply flawed. It’s also scientifically inaccurate.
Humans are part of nature and depend on ecosystems for survival—from the food we eat to the water we drink and air we breathe. Evolutionary biology shows that humans share a common ancestor with all other life on Earth. Forests, rivers and other biomes provide conditions for human life to thrive. And humans have always shaped the environment and have been shaped by it.
Understanding this interconnectedness is key to understanding that human flourishing ultimately depends on a healthy Earth. Rights of nature activists say most societies have forgotten that basic truth, harming their own wellbeing—and threatening their very survival—as a result.
When did this forgetting happen? Academics have traced the notion that humans are separate from, and superior to, nature back to Renaissance-era thinkers like René Descartes, who compared animals to machines. The idea is also woven into the Bible’s book of Genesis, with God giving man “dominion” over the Earth. Others point to the advent of cities, when masses of people lost regular contact with nature.
Modern legal systems have been shaped by these developments and ideas, thus institutionalizing the belief that nature is an object, or thing, beneath humans.
“Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—those who are holding rights at the time,” law professor Christopher Stone wrote in the seminal 1972 law review article, “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone noted that the law has always evolved to extend rights to new groups: moving from white, property-owning men to include women, people of color and children.
In 2006, a rural, conservative Pennsylvania town plagued by industrial pollution enacted the world’s first rights of nature resolution. Since then, scores of countries—including Ecuador, Spain, Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, India, the United States and Uganda—have had court rulings or enacted laws at the national or subnational level recognizing nature’s rights.
The advocates behind these laws argue that if nature’s rights are respected, humans will benefit.
How Do Rights of Nature Laws Differ From Environmental Regulations?
In the course of human history, environmental law is a relatively young field. In the United States, it largely developed in the late 1960s in response to mass pollution wrought by industrialization. Rivers caught fire, pervasive smog blanketed cities and chemicals like DDT were sprayed indiscriminately.
Policymakers enacted legislation like the Clean Water Act and Toxic Substances Control Act to regulate human activity and limit impacts of industry on human health. Those laws did curtail pollution. But rights of nature advocates argue that those conventional laws haven’t stopped the severe environmental problems we face today, like climate change, biodiversity loss and mass pollution.
Advocates say conventional environmental laws have a central flaw: They’re designed to permit pollution. They only control how much.
Rights of nature laws start from an entirely different place. Ecosystems, wildlife and Earth itself are treated as living beings with inherent rights deserving of the highest form of legal protection. The central concern of rights of nature laws is to maintain and preserve the integrity of ecosystems, requiring governments to take a preventative, rather than a reactionary, approach.
Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has said this mandates government officials to respect what is known as the “precautionary principle,” or the idea that, absent adequate scientific evidence, it is better to avoid certain risks that could lead to irreversible damage of ecosystems.
How Do These Laws Work in Practice?
The laws do not give nature’s rights absolute primacy over all other rights and interests.
No legal right is absolute. A right to free speech ends when that speech is defamatory or incites violence. Judges balance competing rights in the decisions they make every day. Nature’s rights are no different.
Rights of nature jurisprudence is still a young field. Most countries with such laws on the books haven’t had lawsuits attempting to enforce them. It’s also important to note that not all rights of nature laws are the same—there is wide variation in how the laws are written and what rights are recognized.
But Ecuador, which constitutionalized nature’s rights in 2008, has seen dozens of cases. There, Mother Earth, or Pachamama, has a right to “integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.”
The Ecuadorian Constitution also requires the government to prevent the “extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, and the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
Not all cases have been favorable for ecosystems. Ecuador’s economy is still largely dependent on oil revenues and other extractive industries.
But Ecuadorian courts have ruled in favor of mangroves, cloud forests, rivers, endangered frogs and coastal marine ecosystems, thwarting mining operations, industrial fishing and other nature-damaging activities. In some cases, courts have ordered the government to restore damaged ecosystems. Cases decided in favor of nature usually have a compelling reason for why nature’s rights ought to prevail over competing interests, like a high risk of extinction for certain species.
In the cloud forest case, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court explained the importance of protecting a sensitive ecosystem from mining impacts, saying: “[T]he risk in this case is not necessarily related to human beings … but to the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems or the permanent alteration of natural cycles.”
In deciding these cases, Ecuadorian courts have depended heavily on scientific experts and evidence. Judges have also looked holistically at the health of ecosystems, rather than at piecemeal levels of pollution—a departure from the way courts tend to evaluate conventional environmental laws.
Scientists have come to the forefront of the movement in other ways. In Panama, for instance, marine biologists were instrumental in the passage of that country’s national rights of nature law.
How Are Rights of Nature Laws Enforced?
Trees and wild animals can’t walk into a courtroom and make their case. But rights of nature laws give ecosystems and species the ability to act in their own capacity under the law with help from people, similar to other non-human entities like corporations, business partnerships, ships and nonprofits.
This is done through a longstanding concept called legal personhood. That legal construct is most commonly used to allow businesses to enter into contracts, sue, be sued, own property and, in the case of corporations, limit the liability of its shareholders.
Each of those nonhuman entities is represented by a human guardian. Similar arrangements are used for minors and incapacitated people in court proceedings.
Who Is Behind This Movement?
Indigenous peoples have been at the forefront of the movement in several ways.
The worldviews of many Indigenous cultures—that humans are part of nature and owe responsibilities to other living beings—are foundational for the movement.
Honoring and preserving those worldviews and related knowledge for centuries has been no small thing. Indigenous communities have faced a long, dark history of colonization and other attempts aimed at eradicating their culture and separating them from their territories. Today, people in many Indigenous communities are still harassed, attacked and sometimes killed for defending water and land.
Indigenous peoples have also been behind many of the laws and court rulings advancing the movement. In New Zealand, Māori people fought for a settlement with the national government, resulting in legal personhood for a river, national park and mountains.
It was Ecuador’s strong Indigenous movements that led to the country becoming the first in the world in 2008 to constitutionally recognize Mother Earth’s rights. Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has also drawn on Indigenous knowledge in deciding rights of nature cases.
Bolivia’s Indigenous movements were behind that country’s 2010 and 2012 laws recognizing the rights of Mother Earth. Enforcement of nature’s rights in Bolivia has proved difficult, however.
Across North America, many Indigenous nations have passed rights of nature laws.
And in Peru, a coalition of Indigenous women won rights for the Marañón River ecosystem, a place the oil industry has heavily polluted for decades. The fight for the Marañón River came at great personal cost for Mariluz Canaquiri Murayari, president of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, and other women in the organization, who were harassed and threatened for their advocacy.
What Are the Criticisms of Rights of Nature Laws?
The biggest opposition to the movement has come from industry groups—developers, the industrial agricultural sector and other polluting industries—and politicians aligned with those interests.
Those opponents argue that giving nature a higher level of protection will impede development and lead to an explosion of litigation. In practice, that hasn’t happened. Barriers to pursuing lawsuits, like the high cost of attorney fees, are substantial.
But the laws do threaten the interests of industries and businesses that have made money off extracting from and monetizing the natural world in unsustainable ways.
Some critics of the movement have questioned whether, if nature has rights, it also has duties: Can a river be sued if it floods and harms humans? Rights of nature advocates respond to this by saying that legal rights, duties and liability are always tailored to the entity they are assigned to.
Corporations, for instance, don’t have a right to family. Nature doesn’t have the capacity to act with intent and therefore should not have legal liability for harm it causes, advocates argue.
Another prevalent charge is that the rights of nature movement is an attempt to force human societies to surrender modern comforts and technology. In practice, though, advocates have sought to rebalance human interests with the health of ecosystems by placing better guardrails around human activity, ensuring the integrity and sustainability of Earth is maintained now and into the future. Advocates argue that humanity isn’t harmed by that but benefits instead.
They also say nothing so quickly forces people to surrender modern comforts as a disaster that destroys their homes and communities, and megadisasters are far more common in a warming world.
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, and papal exhortation Laudate Deum, said humans have a moral duty to protect the Earth.
“For ‘we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it,’” Francis wrote in Laudate Deum.
Ecuadorian activists say the country’s constitutional recognition of nature’s rights has made their country more pluralistic by incorporating the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and is changing the way everyday people think about the Earth, their home.
“We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up only knowing that nature has rights,” Ecuadorian political scientist Natalia Greene told Inside Climate News. “The law has influenced peoples’ understanding of nature and that is very powerful.”
Learn More
Follow our reporting at Inside Climate News. We’re the only newsroom we know of that has a dedicated rights of nature beat. Start here and here.
Books by Indigenous authors and ecocentric thinkers:
Our system of law and government was founded in racial-divisiveness and colonization and is dominated by corporations. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) fights to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to a local self-government system and the Rights of Nature. Fight for a more just, Earth-centered tomorrow, today.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature(GARN) is a global network of organizations and individuals committed to the universal adoption and implementation of legal systems that recognize, respect and enforce “Rights of Nature”
Banner: To protect it from mining and deforestation, Los Cedros cloud forest was awarded the same rights as people.
Ogden: A Tale for the End of Time by Ben G. Price [Editor’s Pick]
It is rare to read something written from a nonhuman perspective without forcing humanlike qualities on them. Ben Price does exactly that in “Ogden: A Tale for the End of Time.” The shift from human’s to troll’s to bear’s to deer’s perspectives seems authentic and genuine. This reflects the author’s own values: of the author being able to view the nonhumans with respect and see the nuances and complexities of their lives, without attributing humanlike qualities to them. It quite fits the author’s profile as well. Ben Price is a pioneer of the Rights of Nature movement – a movement for legal recognition of the rights of natural entities to survive and thrive, a movement that is not possible with a human supremacist attitude.
The lively forests of Huth and Tibbs
Ogden is a magical coming of age story about a troll who is raised by a human family in a society where men secretly meet to plan the genocide of trolls. Unfamiliar with all of this, the family takes care of the troll and attempts to teach him to become more “civilized”, or more man-like. The book is full of multiple themes, reflecting the unfortunate realities of our society – from patriarchy to class division to human supremacy to racism. It has something for all of us who critique one or more aspects of human society. In this review I’ll explore some of these in the context of the different settings presented throughout the novel.
From Drowden Erebus’ bucolic Hapstead Manor to the wild and lively forests of Huth and Tibbs (Ogden’s troll parents) to the un-lively walled town of Irongate to the slum-like settlement of Doltun and Petula, Ben Price jumps from one setting to another without creating an unsettling feeling among the readers. The four settings describe a contrast of social structure, in terms of class divide, racism, human supremacism, patriarchy, colonialism, a contrast that is not just apparent, but, sadly, too familiar to the readers. Taking a different perspective, these four settings are not just four different social structures but a metaphor to different historical times: the wild forests represent the past where we (all creatures including humans) came from; Hapstead Manor the sedentary lifestyle based on agriculture; Irongate as the industrialized cities, ones that the agriculturalists covet; the slums the inevitable byproducts of the cities.
Price puts our modern society in contrast to egalitarian societies
The societal structure inhabited by trolls, like Huth and Tibbs, is based on respect, not only for nature and natural elements, but for fellow conspecifics, for the females of their species and for other species. For one attuned to it, symbols of matriarchy are apparent in Huth and Tibbs’ cave: ancestor worship and Goddess figurines. Consistent with our most reliable knowledge of matriarchal societies, the trolls are also the most egalitarian of the different characters we see.
While the Hapstead Manor is owned by a kind, loving man who treats his women and children and workers well, it is still “owned” by the man of the house. Ultimately, his words are the last, even though Ben Price describes some instances where the wisdom of Drowden’s worker Argis, cook Odelia, wife Dorina or daughter Miranda prove to be superior to Drowden’s judgment. In other words, they have a significant place in the plot.
The same cannot be said for Irongate. Irongate is ruled, apparently and latently, by a group of belligerent entitled men whose sole purpose in life seems to be to increase their wealth and ultimately their power and to protect their supremacy. They are ready to use any means to do so, including silencing, raping or murdering those who don’t comply. That they rationalize their actions with absurd reasoning can be pitied, but not justified.
Finally, the slum-like settlement (Bladicville) where the outcasts live is an inseparable part of the walled town of Irongate. Cities are designed in a way where the land does not support the population, thus the need to import food from villages. At the same time, cities also require jobs risky enough or “low” enough that the residents do not deign to perform, thus a need for a “lower” group of people to do those jobs. That’s how poor quarters or slums are required in a city. This is where the “lower” group of people find their residence. Poverty is not the only thing that classifies them as inferior.
Humans are enslaving trolls
As Americans should know from their own history, in order for slavery to be justified, the slave owners and traders first needed to believe Blacks to be inferior to Whites. Similarly in “Ogden”, there needs to be created a classification where one group of people is considered inferior to the other. This is implied in the historical background of Ogden with the slavery of trolls by humans. Even though the slavery had ended, the hierarchy thus created, of trolls being an inferior group, was still intact. Slum dwellers like Doltun and Petula were ostracized not just because of their poverty, but because they were half trolls and half humans – a group considered inferior based on their genetic association with trolls.
The book resonates with anyone who grieves over the loss of natural world. I would highly recommend it to our readers.
Editor’s Note: This press release from CELDF (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) describes a gag order put against an activist, Tish O’Dell, for talking about her concerns on the use of an industrial byproduct in her community. The gag order was placed in 2012. Since then, tests have affirmed that not only was the product toxic, it is also high in radioactive elements. Lawsuits by big corporations against activists are one of the tools used to shut down any form of resistance. We have talked about it also in the context of the lawsuit against activists and tribal members involved in protecting Thacker Pass. After a decade during which new research has been conducted, Tish O’Dell has appealed for a termination on the gag order.
OHIO, Cuyahoga County – On Friday, June 16, a motion was filed in the Cuyahoga Court of Common Pleas for relief from judgment for Tish O’Dell to terminate the permanent injunction from a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) filed against her in March 2012 by Duck Creek Energy which claimed defamation and loss of business profits.
O’Dell had been active at the time, educating both her community, elected leaders and neighbors about the harmful effects of urban oil/gas drilling happening in her community of Broadview Heights and surrounding communities by sending emails, posting information online and attending community meetings. In the process, she had learned of Duck Creek Energy’s road de-icer, AquaSalina, which according to Duck Creek Energy President, Dave Mansbery, was a byproduct of oil/gas drilling. O’Dell’s concern increased upon learning, from test results reported to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), about the high levels of substances like benzene, toluene and ethylbenzene contained within the supposedly harmless de-icer. These substances are known to be carcinogenic. She also continued to conduct more research on ODNR’s website and in other places in order to inform herself and educate others as to what takes place during the drilling process and fracking.
“When I learned that AquaSalina was being used on my community’s streets as well as in neighboring communities, I wanted to inform people about what I had learned,” said O’Dell. “I felt people needed to know what was being spread on the roads that they, their kids, and their pets were walking on. And common sense indicated to me that what is spread on our streets gets into our air and our lawns and goes down street drains to water supplies. I knew the oil/gas industry was powerful, but I also believed in my right and everyone’s right to free speech and the right to question the government and their decisions. I had never heard of a SLAPP lawsuit until there was a knock at my front door and the person asked if I was Tish O’Dell and told me ‘You’ve been served’.”
After a year of court filings, depositions, and much pressure directed against O’Dell’s inclination to go to trial, a settlement was signed in the fall of 2013. Part of the settlement involved granting a permanent injunction, an extraordinary remedy in a defamation case, against O’Dell, prohibiting her from using certain words to describe the product AquaSalina. During this time Mansbery began bottling and selling the product on store shelves in local hardware stores and even at several Lowe’s locations in Ohio. This afforded activists and scientists the opportunity to purchase the product and begin testing it. And in the decade since, there has been much research and testing of the product by the state agency ODNR, universities, Rolling Stone Magazine and other publications. The tests affirmed that not only was the product chemically toxic, it is also high in radioactive elements, Radium 226 and 228. In October 2021 the Ohio Department of Transportation stopped using AquaSalina in part because of the environmental concerns.
Because these recent test results and scientific research papers didn’t exist in 2012, O’Dell is filing this motion to dissolve the court order so she can again speak freely and warn people about the dangers of this product to both humans and nature. There have been several attempts over the past few years to pass a law at the state level which would make a commodity out of this drilling byproduct. And with the state opening up leasing of park land for fracking this year, there will be more brine produced.
“SLAPP suits are just another tool used by industry and corporations to silence and intimidate those who speak out against them and their activities,” stated Wyatt Sugrue, Chicago attorney. “The goal is not only to silence journalists, individuals and organizations, but to also make others afraid to speak up. In recent years there have been high profile cases of SLAPP suits against John Oliver and HBO, Mother Jones Magazine and recently Texas Gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke who was served with a SLAPP by the CEO of Energy Transfer Partners, Kelcy Warren.”
As stated in the motion:
The Ohio court system has in essence allowed a limited-purpose public figure, Duck Creek Energy, to immunize itself from public scrutiny, and the court system is acting as the personal police force for the company to stop such scrutiny.
“What I have learned over the past decade is how our system, controlled by an elite minority, is quashing the people’s constitutional rights. I witnessed this first hand working with so many great people across the state who were also attempting to protect their own communities and nature. They inspired me to do this,” stated O’Dell. “I can’t just tell others to stand up for their rights and what they believe in and to have courage even when it seems scary, and not practice what I preach.”
A recent article by EarthJustice, September 2022, sums it up, “We aspire for the courts to be an institution that upholds the rights of all, however, SLAPP suits are a way for the rich and powerful to abuse the court system and turn it into a tool that silences individuals and organizations. SLAPP suits disguise themselves as legitimate lawsuits, and while most end up being dismissed, their real goal is quashing legitimate dissent and protest in the process. Protesting is one of the cornerstones of our democracy, a right so important in the early days of our country that it is explicitly included in the first amendment. One thing is clear. Our courts must uphold this right for everyone and cannot become tools for the rich and powerful to abuse power and limit the ability of all of us to seek justice and speak out against issues impacting our communities.”
In the O’Rourke SLAPP, it has been discovered that Warren, the plaintiff, has also made campaign contributions to six of the nine Texas Supreme Court Justices that could ultimately hear the case.
According to CELDF Attorney Terry Lodge, “Ending the gag order on Tish O’Dell is important to our work as an organization. CELDF works with community members and activists throughout the state and country to assert their constitutional and democratic rights to expose harms and stand up for protecting the community and nature. If the wealthy and powerful can file lawsuits to silence their voices, those must always be opposed.”
Editor’s Note: The following events are not organized by DGR. We stand in solidarity with both of these and encourage our readers to get involved in these if possible.
Radical Resilience and Restoration for Wetland Rights
On June 28th CELDF’s Kai Huschke will be presenting at the Society for Wetland Scientists annual conference. Joining Kai on the panel Socio-Ecological Resilience and Adaptation: Implementing Rights of Wetlands will be Senior Ecologist/Natural Climate Solutions Specialist Gillian Davis from BSC Group, Inc. and Tufts University Global Development & Environment Institute, Matthew Simpon, Director from the UK based organization 35percent, and Bill Moomaw, Tufts University Professor Emeritus. The four have been active as part of a global collective working on the community and national levels for the legal rights of wetlands.
Globally for the last 200 years the prevailing directive governmentally, legally, economically, scientifically, and culturally has been to extract and exploit the natural world for the wants and needs of a single species – humans. Colonization has never stopped; it has merely changed its stripes and patterns of speech but behaviorally it continues to conquer into submission and extinction the life forces of the planet with wetlands receiving a disproportionate amount of abuse.
The emergence of legal rights of nature efforts over the last 20 years in North America and across the globe is a potent force for the cultural shift necessary to actualize living from, in, with, and as nature. Wetlands restoration efforts in the name of rights of wetlands can only occur if there is a restoration of the human species on a massive scale that would allow for the healthy and harmonious balance of living from, in, with, and as nature. Science along with other aspects of the culture must reject colonizing systems of law, economics, governance, and even science itself and develop methods and systems outside the dominant one.
Many books have been written about wealth, power and politics in the United States. Most of them make intuitive sense. Wealthy people use their power to influence and control politics. But Ben Price’s new book is often counterintuitive as he explores how wealth itself is imbued with power.
CELDF is making available, a serialization of Ben Price’s book. You can read this award-winning book in free installments of downloadable pdf files and join Ben Price for monthly webinars to discuss the book in the sequence of shared chapters.
Editor’s Note: Jane Anne Morris’ 2005 essay “Help! I’ve Been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up” is considered a classic text within the community rights movement. It criticizes the regulatory regime of environmental and public health protection, which has ultimately helped corporations standardize and de-risk investments, while failing to prevent ecological collapse. Instead of participating in this system, Morris proposes six legal changes which would substantially limit corporate power.
The problems described in this essay have only become even worse since 2005. Barriers to challenging corporate-friendly legal structures are numerous, deeply embedded, and well-defended by teams of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians who are entrenched in government and other institutions like military units employing defense-in-depth. Seventeen years of anti-corporate-power organizing, since this essay was written, has yet to breach these barricades.
Morris’ essay today can be read in at least two ways: first, as calling for a populist effort to reign in corporate power, as she originally intended the piece; and second, as a historic account of advancing corporate power which calls for strategic and ethical escalation in defense of planet Earth.
Take a Lawyer and an Expert To a Hearing and Call Me In a Decade
By Jane Anne Morris
A third of your friends are locked down Reclaiming the Bill of Rights, Building a Movement in an old growth grove or at a corporate headquarters, with law enforcement officers rubbing pepper spray in their eyes. Another third are preparing testimony so you can be persuasive at a generic regulatory agency hearing while you’re begging them to enforce a tiny portion of our laws. The third third are trying to raise money to pay lawyers to get your friends out of jail (after they’ve been released from the hospital) or take the regulatory agency to court (after it declines to enforce the law).
The pepper spray, groveling and money-grubbing might not be so bad if we could honestly say that the earth is better off today than it was four years ago. I can’t honestly say that.
This diatribe is an effort to take a hard look at what we’re doing and insinuate some new elements into the debate. It’s not intended to belittle any of our efforts, point fingers, or assign blame, so don’t take it personally. We are all earthlings.
Our campaigns follow the gambling addiction model. The last bet didn’t pay off but the next one might if… if… if we just had a new, improved tripod, three more experts, more labor or church support, ten more elected officials on our side, a hundred more people at the demo, or a thousand more letters in the mail…. Who are we kidding? We are just doing the “same old thing” over and over again and fooling ourselves that it might work next time.
We are stuck in a feedback loop where our failures are interpreted as signs that we should repeat our failed tactics, but try harder. This is what it is to be colonized. The telltale sign is not that we’re failing, but that we’re fooling ourselves, and don’t see it as a feedback loop.
If our minds are not colonized, then how come almost every Earth First! Journal action piece starts with a banner or a lockdown and ends with a plea to write a letter to a white male bigshot? (Go ahead, look through back issues. It goes on for years and years.)
Over at corporate headquarters they have a steeper learning curve.
Despite the occasional bag of guts on the committee table or clever banner, it must be reassuring for corporate executives and those who serve them to sit back and smile at the success of their containment efforts, and the predictability of our campaigns.
The issue of whose minds are colonized is a delicate one. We all know people whose minds have been colonized. Who are they? They are other people — people out there. They are somebody else. Not us.
It’s time we did the unthinkable and asked ourselves if we have been colonized. What do we see when we compare our strategies to corporate strategies?
Many of our groups are organized to save wolves, butterflies, trees, prairie flowers, rivers, deserts, or estuaries. But corporation executives don’t organize to destroy the wolves, butterflies… flowers… estuaries. Nor do they organize to pollute the air, spoil the rivers, or promote five-legged frogs.
This asymmetry should give us pause as we try to understand why corporations are on a roll while we’re stuck in a feedback loop. Let’s look again.
Corporate strategy leverages their power; their efforts reinforce and magnify each other. Our strategy splits our resources and dissipates our power.
Corporate strategy aims to increase the power that corporations have over people. That means that when a single corporation gets a victory, it helps all other corporations, too. They are all stronger, they all have more power, and the people have less.
We work on separate harms. When we lock down to one old growth stand, others go unprotected. When we protest about one chemical, others go unprotested. When we testify to preserve one watershed, others are not spoken for.
We have whole campaigns directed at one chemical, one corporation, one species, one grove of trees, one article of clothing.
In doing so, we fracture our resources. While we’re out working on a “Chlorine is Bad” or “Wolves are Good” campaign, we’re not working on all of the other chemicals, animals, trees, etc., that also need attention.
Some of us argue that this fracturing is inevitable, because there’s so much wrong in the world. (Declaring a problem to be inevitable is a great way to justify not talking about it. Another gift to the corporate world view.)
Others of us think that the fracturing results from not being organized enough, or not being organized right. This opens the door for endless bickering about whether we should organize by bioregion or by article of clothing, by species or by chemical, by issue or by occupation. Either way, we’re still fractured.
Being fractured is another way of being colonized.
Another sure sign of being colonized is when you censor yourselves, and don’t even wait for others to do it. Some of our self-imposed limitations are right off of a corporate wish list.
We have a strange “but it’s the law” syndrome. Why can’t we bring up important issues at EPA hearings? It’s regulatory (administrative) law. Why can’t we get our views accurately presented on TV? It’s (corporate) private property law and FCC regulations. Why can’t we imprison corporate executives for what their corporations do? It’s liability law.
So what do we do? We toe the line at the EPA hearing. We dress up as animals to get a moment on TV. We let lying corporate executives lie.
That is, we work around the defining laws that are the groundwork for a rigged system. We’re looking for favors, lucky breaks. We don’t even dream of control, yet we call this a democracy.
This is being colonized.
Corporation representatives do not feel constrained in this way. Nothing is too destructive, too audacious, too outrageous for them to attempt. After all, they have most of us believing and not even objecting to the idea that corporations have “rights.” In early 1998 an association of corporations (itself a corporation that supposedly has “free speech” rights, according to prevailing legal opinion) sued a talk show host in Texas for saying that she’s going to stop eating hamburgers.[1]
Then there’s the Zen of “Describing The Problem.”
We need our storytellers, we need our scribes, we need our analysts, we need our own human fonts of crazy ideas. We needed Silent Spring.[2] By now we have the equivalent of Son of Silent Spring, Daughter of Silent Spring, Second Cousin Once Removed of Silent Spring. But habitat destruction continues as fast as we can describe it, if not faster. Our compulsion to Describe The Problem (something we do really well) serves a purpose, especially for people who think there’s no problem, but the people who need to hear it the most aren’t hearing it. We’re Describing The Problem to each other in lavish detail, which crowds out efforts to rethink our whole strategy.
Are we doing anything other than lurching back and forth between Describing The Problem and then buckling the seatbelt on our feedback loop? I for one think I’ve heard enough “Bad Things About Corporations,” and I’m pretty tired of working on campaigns that will not only fail, but fail in predictable ways.
How have we been colonized? Let me count the ways. We interpret failures as signals to do the same things over again. We are predictable. Our strategies and styles of organizing fracture and dilute our resources. We either accept this dilution as inevitable, or blame each other for not organizing right. We censor ourselves, in thought and action. We act as though if we Describe The Problem to each other enough, it might go away.
And now, we can argue about whether we’ve been colonized or not. Corporate management is popping extra popcorn for this one.
But enough of what we do. What do corporations do? (The question should be, “What do people do behind the fiction of corporations?” One of the signs of our being colonized is that we personify corporations. I’ve been trying to avoid that in this piece but… help, I’ve been colonized and I need help getting up….)
Corporate management figured out a hundred years ago that fighting against each other, competing and diluting their resources was weakening them and limiting their power. So they don’t do that any more.
So what do people do while hiding behind the corporate shield? The short version is that they write a script for us, and we follow it. Then they write a script for themselves, and we don’t even read it.
A big part of the script written for us involves Regulatory Law (including environmental and administrative law). It assumes that corporations have the rights of constitutional “persons.”
It outlines procedures for what We the People can do (not much); what government can do (a little more); and what corporations can do (a lot).
At regulatory agencies, corporate “persons” (that is, corporations) have constitutional rights to due process and equal protection that human persons, affected citizens, do not have. For non-corporate human citizens there’s a “Democracy Theme Park” where we can pull levers on voting machines and talk into microphones at hearings. But don’t worry, they’re not connected to anything and nobody’s listening ‘cept us.
What Regulatory Law regulates is citizen input, not corporate behavior. So when we cooperate in regulatory law proceedings, we are following the script that corporation representatives wrote for us. We’re either colonized, or we’re collaborators. That the regulatory agencies fail to protect the public is clear. Why they fail is another matter.
One reason is that they were set up with the cooperation of and sometimes at the urging of big corporations. Today regulatory agencies and trade associations work together to do the work that the “trusts” of the last century were set up to do.
A second reason for regulatory failure concerns the nature of the corporation, to which we turn briefly.
Corporations are not natural entities, like karner blue butterflies or white pines. Corporations are artificial creations that are set up by state corporation codes. These state laws, plus a bunch of court cases, form the basis for the notion that corporations have powers and “rights.”
This law is Defining Law. This law is the script that corporate lawyers write for corporations. This law is the law that we don’t even read.
It’s right there in the law books in black and white, just like the “regs” that we spend so much time on. But this Defining Law is invisible to us because we’ve been colonized and have accepted it as a given. We leave this defining law — in corporation codes, bankruptcy law, insurance law, etc. — to corporation lawyers, who rewrite it every few years without so much as a whimper from citizen activists. Then we wonder why the parts-per-million regulations aren’t enforced.
So, the second reason that regulatory agencies fail to protect the public is that we have allowed corporate lawyers to write the Defining Law of corporations. This law bestows upon corporations powers and rights that exceed those of human persons and sometimes of government as well. It seems pretty obvious, then, that we need to rewrite the Defining Law.
Sooner or later we come up against the claim that all this stuff about “rights” and so on is just too legalistic. None of us wants to be involved in narrow and excessively legalistic strategies.
However, a glance through any Earth First! journal will confirm that we’re constantly dealing with The Law, whether we’re filing testimony or engaged in direct action. As long as we’re in the legal arena, we might as well be dealing with Defining Law, and not the regulatory frufru that we’ve allowed to distract us.
If the civil rights movement had been afraid to touch the deep defining “law of the land” we’d still be laboring under “separate but equal.” For as long as we stick with Regulatory Law and leave Defining Law to corporate lawyers, we’ll have corporate government.
What are we going to do tomorrow morning?
We could keep doing what hasn’t worked in case it works next time; we could denounce people who suggest that what we’re doing isn’t working; we could declare victory so our folks won’t get so depressed and discouraged. I’d like to steer clear of those options.
I’d also like to avoid “negotiating” with corporations as though they were persons with a role in a democratic system, and avoid doing anything else that accepts that corporations have the constitutional rights of human persons.
Here is one cluster of ideas for rewriting the Defining Law of corporations. It’s not a 3-point plan, and it’s not the beginning of a twenty point plan — just some ideas to think about.
1. Prohibit corporations from owning stock in other corporations. Owning stock in other corporations enables corporations to control huge markets and shift responsibility, liability, resources, assets and taxes back and forth among parent corporations, subsidiaries and other members of their unholy families. By defining corporations in such a way to prohibit such ownership, much of the anti-trust regulatory law becomes unnecessary and superfluous.
2. Prohibit corporations from being able to choose when to go out of business (in legalese, no voluntary dissolution). This would prevent corporations from dissolving themselves when it came time to pay taxes, repay government loans, pay creditors, pay pensions, pay for health care, and pay for toxic cleanups.
3. Make stockholders liable for a corporation’s debts. People who want to be stockholders would reallocate their resources to corporations that they knew something about, that weren’t engaged in risky, toxic projects. (This would encourage local, sustainable businesses and healthy local economies. Imagine that.)
These three measures might seem “unrealistic” to some, but it beats the heck out of a voluntary code of conduct, or a wasted decade at a regulatory agency. All three of these provisions were once common features of state corporation codes. No wonder corporate apologists prefer that we hang around in the regulatory agencies with our heads spinning with parts per million and habitat conservation plans.
These three measures were quite effective, which is why corporation lawyers worked so hard to get rid of them. But they address only a tiny portion of what needs to be done.
Here’s another cluster of ideas for ways to shape a democratic process that is about people. (The idea that corporations have “rights” would seem nonsensical to any but a colonized mind.)
1. No corporate participation in the democratic process. Democracy is for and about human beings. Corporations should be prohibited from paying for any political advertisements, making any campaign contributions, or seeking to influence the democratic process in any way.
2. Corporations have no constitutional rights.
A corporation is an artificial creation set up to serve a public need, not an independent entity with intrinsic “rights.”
3. Corporations should be prohibited from making any civic, charitable, or educational donations. Such donations are used to warp the entire social and economic fabric of society, and make people afraid to speak out against corporations.
These probably seem even more “unrealistic” than the first batch. Imagine how good it is for corporate executives that we find these ideas “impractical.” And by the way, these were all once law, too.
The final objection to be raised is that we’ll never get anywhere as long as the “news media” are against us, refuse to cover our issues, and distort our views. Agreed.
But the “news media” are corporations, key players in a system of propaganda that encompasses not only television, radio and newspapers, but also the entire educational system. The “airwaves” belong to the public.
Why have we allowed a puppet federal agency to “lease” the public airwaves to huge corporations? Ya wanna lock down? Lock down to a TV or radio station and make the public airwaves public again. Not for a day but for a lifetime.
Ya like boycotts? What if a regulatory agency gave a hearing and nobody came? The outcome would be the same but we wouldn’t have wasted all the time and resources, nor would we have helped grant an aura of legitimacy to a sham proceeding.
What could we do instead? We could get together with the lawyer and the expert and begin to figure out how to stop being collaborators.
Jane Anne Morris was a corporate anthropologist who lived in Madison, Wisconsin. She was the author of Not in My Backyard: The Handbook, and a member of POCLAD, the program on Corporations, Law and Democracy. Some of her work has appeared previously in Rachel’s (#488, #489, and #502). In its present form, this essay originally appeared in Defying Corporations, Defining Democracy. This article originally appeared on POCLAD.
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