Two people have died and three others are injured following a confrontation between indigenous peoples and loggers of an endangered tree in Panama.
The conflict began began on March 30, when a group of Wounaan attempted to burn logging equipment that was being used by a group of loggers working for Maderera company to cut Cocobolo timber, a type of rosewood that’s prized around the world.
The endangered hardwood is often used to make gun grips, knife handles, police batons, high-end billiard cues, marine equipment, chess pieces and various musical instruments (marimbas, clarinets, xylophones, acoustic guitars). It is also sought after in China for use in furniture.
Details of the attack are still limited, but according to recent testimony, one of the loggers began firing a weapon at the Wounaan leader Aquilino Opúa was gravely injured during the attack.
The injured leader, it was said, walked through the mountains for at least an hour before making it back to his community, where he soon passed on. The enraged community quickly mobilized to confront the loggers. Upon their arrival, a second melee followed, which resulted in the death of Ezequiel Batista, one of the tractor drivers.
At least three other Wounaan were injured during the two confrontations.
Prior to these events, Wounaan leaders had issued a statement and ultimatum, giving the Panamanian government until April 19 to issue collective titles to their lands as guaranteed by Law 72 of 2008. They also demanded the complete removal of all settlers in the Chiman zone (who had already clashed with the Wounaan on two other occasions this year) and the end of all indiscriminate logging in the area.
“We demand the government to remove the settlers of our land and take responsibility for what happens, because we are willing to defend our land with blood,” said Edilberto Dogirama, president of the Embera-Wounaan General Congress.
Panama’s National Environmental Authority (ANAM) had then suspended all logging permits for two weeks to avoid any conflicts in the region. It had also ordered an eviction of all persons involved in the timber industry.
At least one logging group–that is, company–did not comply with the official order.
Javier Tejeira, Deputy Minister of Government, yesterday said that Police carried out a weekend raid to evict the remaining loggers.
An inquiry into these events is currently ongoing. So far, no arrests have been made.
Less than a year after being pulled off the Endangered Species Act (ESA), gray wolves (Canis lupus) in the western U.S. are facing an onslaught of hunting. The hunting season for wolves has just closed in Montana with 160 individuals killed, around 75 percent of 220-wolf kill quota for the state. In neighboring Idaho, where 318 wolves have been killed so far by hunters and trappers, the season extends until June. In other states—Oregon, Washington, California, and Utah—wolf hunting is not currently allowed, and the species is still under federal protection in Wyoming.
In Idaho fourteen wolves were also killed by the government using helicopters in a bid to prop up elk herds. Legislators in the state are also mulling a recent proposal to allow aerial hunting and the use of live bait to kill wolves that have harassed livestock or pets. Republican and sheep rancher Jeff Siddoway, who introduced the legislation, said he would have no problem using his dog as live bait.
Wolves are hugely controversial in the region: ranchers point to them as a cause for livestock mortalities, while hunters blame them for a decline in elk. Biologists, however, say the elk decline may be due to a combination of drought, hunting by people, and the return of wolves. By nature wolves prey on young, old, and weak animals, and likely have little overall impact on a healthy herd.
In fact, a recent study study in Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains found that wolves were not a primary driver behind elk mortalities. Examining 36 elk calf kills, the study determined that mountain lions were responsible for thirteen (36 percent), black bears killed four (11 percent), wolves also killed four (11 percent), five died of natural causes (13 percent), and ten mortalities were due to unknown causes (27 percent).
However, as top predators, wolves have a big impact on elk and other prey’s behavior, which results in massive implications for the health of an ecosystem. Long-term studies in Yellowstone National Park have recorded notable changes since the return of wolves after a 70-year absence. The findings have shown that wolves are key to a healthy, diverse ecosystem.
Research has found that by keeping elk on the run and in hiding, wolves protect plants and trees that had long been over-browsed, saving some species from local extinction. The presence of wolves allowed trees to grow up along rivers for the first time in decades in Yellostone, protecting against erosion and cooling rivers through shade. In turn, the riverside trees allowed for the return of beavers, which had nearly vanished from Yellowstone. Through dam-building beavers created new habitat for fish. With more trees and shrub cover, songbird populations rose. Scavengers from bear to ravens were aided by wolf-kills. In all, biodiversity and wildlife abundance blossomed.
Less than 2,000 wolves are currently found in seven states of the western U.S., the bulk of them in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. California has only one. By contrast 3,000 wolves are found in northern Minnesota alone.
On August 27, 2009, Dan Cincotta, a fisheries biologist with West Virginia’s Department of Natural Resources, was conducting a routine inventory of Dunkard Creek, a small river that runs through West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania. He was accompanied by a consultant and an environmental engineer from the state’s largest coal and gas company, Consol Energy, which operates a coalmine, Blacksville #2, just outside of Wana, West Virginia. Cincotta was supposed to do electro-fish surveys, whereby the fish are temporarily stunned in order to assess populations, and to take a series of conductivity readings – a basic measure of how much salt is dissolved in water.
When his first reading measured 20,000 micro siemens per centimeter squared (µS/cm), Cincotta thought his equipment was broken; he had never seen readings above 5,000. The Consol consultant took her own reading in the same location but farther from the riverbank. It registered 40,000 µS/cm. Still in disbelief, Cincotta says, “we wandered upstream and found [Consol’s mining] discharge. And in the discharge alone, straight out of the pipe our equipment registered over 50,000 µS/cm,” roughly the equivalent of seawater. Untreated acid mine discharges typically have conductance values of between 1,000 and 1,500 µS/cm.
The following day, a Friday, Cincotta sent an email to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) field office in West Virginia alerting them to the extraordinarily high conductivity levels. Then, over the weekend, the reports of dead fish began. During the next month about 22,000 fish washed ashore (some estimates say as many as 65,000 died). At least 14 species of freshwater mussels – the river’s entire population – were destroyed, wiping out nearly every aquatic species along a 35-mile stretch of Dunkard Creek. “That’s the ultimate tragedy,” says Frank Jernejcic, a fisheries biologist with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. “Fish will come back, we can get the fish back. The mussels are a generational thing.”
The scene was horrific: Many of the fish were bleeding from the gills and covered in mucous; mud puppies, a kind of gilled salamander that lives underwater, had tried to escape by crawling onto nearby rocks; three-foot long muskies washed up along the riverbanks. The die-off marked one of the worst ecological disasters in the region’s history.
“Unless you have actually seen a fish kill, it’s one of the most devastating things that you can imagine,” says Verna Presley, a retired teacher who lives on the creek. “Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
A nearly three-month-long investigation by state and federal regulators eventually tied the kill to an invasive algae species known as golden algae (Prymnesium parvum). Yet golden algae offered only a partial explanation for the disaster. It may have been the immediate reason for the kill, but it wasn’t the underlying cause. The algae itself cannot survive in freshwater; it thrives only in marine-like environments. Somehow, a freshwater, inland ecosystem had become saline enough for the algae to grow and multiply.
How did this Appalachian stream become so salty? There is no single answer, no smoking gun. The contaminated water might have come from acid mine drainage discharges – outflow of wastewater from nearby coalmines, which has been occurring for decades. It might also be tied to natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale, a relatively new industry in the region. Or perhaps it was a toxic cocktail of both.
The complexity of the disaster has allowed the company most likely responsible for destroying the stream, Consol Energy, to deny wrongdoing. “Working with renowned biologists, Consol Energy determined its operations were not the cause” of the fish kill, the company said in a 2010 press release. Still, Consol recently reached an agreement with the EPA to pay $5.5 million in civil penalties and construct a brine water treatment plant by 2013.
The EPA and state regulatory agencies have concluded that acid mine drainage from Consul’s coalmine led to the algae bloom. But many area residents, some local conservation officers, and the lead EPA investigator on the case have cast doubt on that assumption. They believe the stresses of coal bed methane extraction and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Marcellus Shale also contributed to the stream’s worsening condition. They argue that acid mine drainage alone doesn’t explain the changes that occurred in the stream’s composition and that illegal dumping of wastewater and water withdrawals from Dunkard Creek must have played some part in the algae bloom.
“Because you don’t think of the sound of a stream until it’s dead and it’s just the eeriest silence that you can imagine. Everything right down to the insects was killed.”
The fish kill at Dunkard Creek points to a systemic threat that could jeopardize the watersheds of an entire region. As unconventional shale gas production expands throughout the Northeast (conservative estimates are that 60,000 wells will be drilled in Pennsylvania alone over the next two decades) its rivers and streams may be forced to absorb increasingly large volumes of exceptionally salty water – water ten to twenty times more saline than seawater. “Produced water,” as it is referred to by the industry, is a mix of fracking chemicals, water, and dissolved shale formation solids; it represents the largest volume byproduct of oil and gas exploration and production in the United States.
Pennsylvania officials, at least, seem to recognize that improper disposal of produced water would lead to an environmental and public health fiasco. State regulators recently said that municipal treatment plants would no longer be permitted to accept Marcellus Shale wastewater, a major policy reversal. What the state plans to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater created during the drilling process remains unclear.
Dunkard Creek snakes along the Pennsylvania-West Virginia border and eventually empties into the Monongahela River, which flows north to Pittsburgh. The creek was long considered one of the most diverse streams in the Monongahela watershed. Known for its muskellunge fishing, it also supported an unusually rich population of freshwater mussels. The area is also dotted with coalmines, many of which discharge acid drainage directly into the creek and its tributaries. Massive underground mine pools must be continuously pumped either by the companies that own them or, if they’ve been abandoned, by the state. Billions of gallons of treated wastewater are discharged into the Monongahela River basin annually.
In recent years, coal bed methane extraction – the absorption of natural gas from coal seams – along with natural gas hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale have placed further stresses on the river in the form of water withdrawals and wastewater disposal. In Greene County, through which Dunkard Creek runs, more than 250 natural gas wells have been drilled in just a few years. Consol, the largest producer of coal from underground mines in the United States, has described the fossil fuel-rich area as “the continental US equivalent of Prudhoe Bay.” Like Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the region has begun to experience the impacts of large-scale industrial development and resource extraction.
A month after the fish kill, state and federal officials pointed to acid mine drainage – Consol had been discharging the waste directly into Dunkard Creek for decades – as the cause of the algae bloom and fish kill. Found worldwide in estuarine waters, golden algae was first reported in the United States, in Texas, in 1985. Since then it has killed more than 12 million fish in Texas and has slowly spread to several other river basins. The algae responds to certain stressed environments by releasing a toxin that ruptures the tissue cells in the mouths and gills of fish, depriving them of oxygen and causing them to suffocate – hence the desperate attempts of the fish and mudpuppies to escape the river. Until the Dunkard Creek fish kill, however, the algae had never been detected north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“When the fish kill first happened, we in the research community got a lot of calls,” says Jeanne VanBriesen, director of the Center for Water Quality at Carnegie Mellon University. “‘Who do you know who knows anything about golden algae?’ And we all said the same thing: ‘In Pennsylvania why would anyone know anything about golden algae? You have to go to Texas or Florida because it hadn’t been seen here.’” Golden algae has now been found in several waterways in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
How the algae ended up in Dunkard Creek may never be known. Dr. David Hambright, a professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, has analyzed samples of golden algae from Dunkard Creek and is investigating the phylogenetic relationships between different strains. “It’s never going to be possible to say, okay, it was a bucket of water on the back of a drilling truck from South Texas,” he told me. “It was very likely wind borne.” Hambright isn’t surprised that the algae has been found in Dunkard Creek. “What’s surprising,” he says, “is that they would find the habitat in which they could live.” But they did. In the case of Dunkard Creek, unusually high levels of dissolved solids, nutrient-rich water, and low flows created a kind of perfect storm for the algae’s growth.
Early assessments of the kill pointed to fracking wastewater as the source of the river’s high levels of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) – a rough measure of salts and minerals dissolved in water. “The elevated levels of TDS and chlorides in the creek indicates oil- and gas-drilling wastewater,” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) spokeswoman Kathy Cosco said at the time. However, water samples taken later showed that the dominant ion in Dunkard Creek around the time of the kill was sulfate, which is typical of acid mine drainage, and not chloride (although chloride levels were also abnormally high) commonly found in fracking wastewater.
This led the Pennsylvania and West Virginia environmental agencies to conclude that the high conductivity levels that caused the algal bloom were largely the result of acid mine drainage. “There’s no evidence at this point – nor do I think there will be – that any of the problems in Dunkard Creek were related to the oil and gas industry,” says Pennsylvania DEP Southwest Regional Director Ron Schwartz. “There were a lot of different causes for it, but that wasn’t one of them,” he says. Scott Mandirola, director of West Virginia DEP’s Division of Water and Waste Management, agrees. “The Dunkard issue is mine water,” he says. “We investigated this thing from top to bottom and everything we’ve got points to the mining discharges.”
But Consol denies that it is at fault and, as part of its agreement with the EPA, has not admitted liability for the kill. “We do not believe the discharge from our mining operations caused the fish kill,” says Joe Cerenzia, PR director for the company. He points out that Consol has operated the mine for 30 years without incident. “It was the algae that did [it].” The company’s rationale – that it had discharged acid mine drainage into Dunkard Creek for 30 years without any problems – raises more questions than it answers. What, then, changed the river’s composition?
In emails obtained by The New York Times under a Freedom of Information Act request, Lou Reynolds, the lead EPA biologist on the case, wrote: “Mine discharges from those deep mines shouldn’t differ a lot from the normal mining constituents. Something has changed in the mine pools.”
The difference, many local residents speculate, was wastewater from natural gas and coal bed methane extraction. The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation that was deposited more than 350 million years ago in a shallow inland sea. These ancient rocks contain chlorides that dissolve during the process of hydraulic fracturing. Abnormally high chloride readings in Dunkard Creek could have come from improper disposal of produced water, residents say.
In 2005 Consol Energy formed a subsidiary, CNX Gas, which specializes in coal bed methane extraction and natural gas drilling. That same year it applied for a permit to operate the Morris Run injection well – part of the abandoned Blacksville #1 coalmine – to dispose of wastewater from coal bed methane extraction. The Morris Run borehole is on the Pennsylvania side of the river, just upstream from the Blacksville #2 mine in West Virginia. CNX’s permit required the company to secure the area with a fence and monitor the cumulative volume of water injected into the well.
An EPA inspection in August 2008 found that the company was violating several provisions of the permit application. Then, in the spring of 2010, one of Consol’s primary contractors, Allan’s Waste Water Service, a wastewater hauling company, was charged with multiple counts of illegally dumping toxic waste, including Marcellus Shale-produced wastewater. According to a grand jury presentment, drivers for the company testified that they dumped drilling wastewater into the Morris Run borehole and into several tributaries of Dunkard Creek. “Drivers testified that Allan’s Waste Water was responsible for receiving, transporting, and disposing of production water from gas wells owned and operated by CNX,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office noted. “According to the drivers, during the summer of 2007, CNX’s gas wells began to generate more production water than Allan’s Waste Water was capable of handling. As a result, [company owner] Shipman showed the drivers how to leave open the gas well valves and ordered them to discharge production water into the ground and/or into the nearby waterways,” including Dunkard Creek.
Before the fish kill there was a steady stream of traffic on the narrow dirt road that leads up to the borehole, local residents say. “It was 24/7 trucks going up the road to the borehole,” says Verna Presley, who lives nearby. “They even constructed areas off of the road so that one truck could pull over and another one could get past.”
Martin Niverth, who was Greene County Conservation Commissioner at the time, says that he received numerous phone calls from people living in the area complaining about the traffic on the road to the underground injection well. “There’s trucks coming and going. Well, that kind of volume, you know, what does that tell you? I know what it tells me. You know that you have Marcellus dumping going on down there.” Even Mandirola of the West Virginia DEP concurs: “A lot of Marcellus wastewater went down in that hole,” he says. “There is a separation between those two mines,” says Mandirola. “But there is seepage through the wall. I don’t think anybody really knows how much seepage is occurring, but the Morris Run borehole is right at the edge of that division.”
Presley also says that the haulers were withdrawing water from the river, presumably for use in fracking operations, which require millions of gallons of freshwater per well. “They were pumping so much out of Dunkard Creek that they just put their hoses into the water and left them there for the next truck to come and hook up and pull it out,” she says. “We literally watched the stream go down about 12 inches prior to the fish kill.”
USGS data from further downstream shows a steep decline in river flows during that period. “The decrease in flows at the end of August does look suspect,” Clinton Hittle, a hydrologist with the USGS, wrote in an email.
Niverth, whose first job was at the Blacksville #2 mine loading coal, believes that the unregulated injection of Marcellus wastewater into the Morris Run borehole, illegal dumping, and water withdrawals all contributed to the fish kill. “I fished that stream for years and years,” Niverth says, “and that’s why some of us are still very skeptical, because those mines operated for years. … Then right when the Marcellus comes in this happens. Why?”
Several months before the fish kill, the EPA was in the process of drafting a consent order to address Consol’s security violations at the injection well. But after the fish die-off the company decided to plug and abandon the well. It was still fined the maximum penalty of $157,000 for failing to secure the site, but the underground injection well was never officially linked to the kill.
Dan Cincotta, the biologist who first recorded unusually high conductivity readings on Dunkard Creek, says that salinity levels in rivers and streams in Pennsylvania and West Virginia are a growing concern. Over the last 30 years he’s sampled thousands of streams and conducted several statewide surveys. “All the streams around are much higher in conductivity than they used to be,” he says. Shale gas extraction will likely just add to the problem. Last year the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia released preliminary data from one of the few studies to look at the impact of shale gas drilling on rivers and streams. They found that TDS levels were significantly higher and biodiversity indicators reduced in streams exposed to high-density gas drilling. At the same time, billions of gallons of acid mine drainage must be disposed of annually.
“We’re at the assimilative capacity of the river,” says David Argent, a fisheries biologist at the California University of Pennsylvania who has conducted surveys on the Monongahela. “In other words, you can’t dilute any more in the Monongahela. It doesn’t matter what it is – if it’s Marcellus, if it’s mining, if it’s sewage, if it’s treated sewage, if it’s untreated sewage, we’re there. And I think it’s just a matter of what is it that’s going to tip the scale now and push us over the edge.”
In 2008, TDS levels on the Monongahela were twice as high as the historical maximum since record keeping began in the 1960s, including a period during which the river supported little or no aquatic life. That summer, during a period of low flows, there were reports of foul smelling drinking water and malfunctioning dishwashers in a residential neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. The DEP issued an advisory warning suggesting that residents drink bottled water (the Monongahela is a source of drinking water for about one million people) and later determined that nine sewage treatment plants were discharging large volumes of Marcellus Shale-produced water into the river. An internal EPA memo obtained by The New York Times described the incident as “one of the largest failures in US history to supply clean drinking water to the public.”
One year later, the high TDS and chloride levels that led to the Dunkard Creek fish kill were detected on the Monongahela, more than 40 miles downstream, in Elizabeth, PA. “I think that was kind of the alarm cry that we needed,” Argent says. “Because I think at that point people really started to question, you know, what’s going on with the water.”
Miguel Guimaraes, a Shipibo-Konibo leader, has spent his life protesting palm oil plantations and other agribusiness ventures exploiting the Amazon rainforest in his homeland of Peru. Last spring, as he attended a United Nations conference on protecting human rights defenders in Chile, masked men broke into his home, stole his belongings, and set the place on fire. Guimarares returned days later to find “he will not live” spray-painted on the wall.
The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, denounced the attack and urged Peru to guarantee Guimarare’s protection. Although Guimaraes enjoyed international support, his assailants haven’t been identified.
Guimaraes is one of 6,400 activists who endured harassment or violence for defending human rights against corporate interests. That’s according to a new report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre that chronicles attacks and civil violations human rights defenders worldwide have experienced over the past decade. Although Indigenous people make up 6 percent of the world population, they accounted for one-fifth of the crimes documented in the report. They also were more likely than others to be killed, particularly in Brazil, the Philippines, and Mexico.
Some of these attacks arise from the “range of ways” governments are restricting civic space and discourse and “prioritizing economic profit,” said Christen Dobson, an author of the report and co-head of the Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders Programme. “Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen a consistent, sustained pattern of attacks against people who speak out against business-related human rights, risks, and harms,” he said.
Most of these attacks are reported by local organizations focused on documenting and collecting Indigenous cases, and the number of crimes against them may be higher. “The only reason we know about even a slice of the scale of attacks against defenders worldwide is because defenders themselves are sharing that information, often at great risk,” said Dobson.
Virtually every industry has a case in the database that the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre maintains. The organization has tracked companies, trade associations, and governments believed to have requested, or paid, law enforcement to intervene in peaceful protest activity. In 2023, for example, local authorities in Oaxaca, Mexico, attacked and injured members of the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Northern Zone of the Isthmus who were peacefully blocking the Mogoñe Viejo-Vixidu railway, which posed a threat to 12 Indigenous communities in the area.
The protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline saw the highest number of attacks related to a single project over the last decade, the report found. Around 100,000 people in 2016 and 2017 gathered to oppose the pipeline and were met with a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and arrest. Energy Transfer, the company that led the project, filed a defamation suit accusing Greenpeace of violating trespassing and defamation laws and coordinating the protests. In March, a jury ordered Greenpeace to pay $660 million in damages, a verdict legal experts called “wildly punitive.”
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre cites that lawsuit as an example of companies using a legal tactic called a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP suit, to silence dissent and harass protesters. But Energy Transfer cited that courtroom victory in its response to the nonprofit’s report: “The recent verdict against Greenpeace was also a win for the people of North Dakota who had to live through the daily harassment and disruptions caused by the protesters who were funded and trained by Greenpeace.”
Fossil fuel companies were hardly the only offenders, however. Dobson and her team identified several cases involving renewable energy sectors, where projects have been linked to nearly 365 cases of harassment and more than 100 killings of human rights defenders.
But mining, including the extraction of “transition minerals,” leads every sector in attacks on defenders. Forty percent of those killed in such crimes were Indigenous, a reflection of the fact that more than half of all critical minerals lie in or near Indigenous land.
The outsize scale of harassment and violence against Indigenous people prompted the U.N. special rapporteur to release a statement last year making clear that “a just transition to green energy must support Indigenous peoples in securing their collective land rights and self-determination over their territories, which play a vital role in biodiversity, conservation, and climate change adaptation.“
Businesses, particularly those in mining and metals, are being pressured to ensure their operations do just that. The Consolidated Mining Standard Initiative, or CSMI, for example, is a voluntary framework to improve industry policies adopted by several trade associations like the Mining Association of Canada. “The standard addresses a broad range of community risks by requiring mining operations to work with communities to identify and work together to mitigate risks faced by the community,” the association said. “Such risks include those to human rights defenders, where they exist.”
Another member of the initiative, the International Council of Mining and Metals, said it has “strengthened our member commitments on human rights defenders to explicitly include defenders in companies’ due diligence, stakeholder engagement, and security processes. Defenders often work on issues related to land, the environment, and Indigenous peoples’ rights.”
Even as this report highlights the dangers human rights defenders face, a growing need for critical minerals, mounting demand for the infrastructure to support AI, and the dismantling of regulatory oversight in the United States bring new threats. The report also makes clear that these attacks will not decrease until broad agreements to adopt and implement protections for these activists are enacted. Such policies must be accompanied by legislation designating Indigenous stewardship of their land and requiring their involvement in project consultations.
Yet Indigenous organizations tend to doubt any industry can be trusted to voluntarily participate in such efforts. In a letter sent to the CSMI, 25 human rights organizations including the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre said mandatory participation will be required to ensure robust protection of human rights defenders and relationships between industry and Indigenous peoples. “People and the environment suffer when companies are left to self-regulate with weak voluntary standards,” the letter stated.
Still, change is coming, however slowly. When Dobson and her team started tracking the harassment and violence against human rights defenders, she wasn’t aware of any companies with a policy pledging to not contribute to or assist attacks against defenders. Since then, “We’ve tracked 51 companies that have made this policy commitment,” she said. “Unfortunately that doesn’t always mean we see progress in terms of implementation of those policies.”
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.
