Environmental Personhood and the Rights of Rivers

By Monishaa Suresh

This is the first entry of a two-part post on environmental personhood. It defines and explains the history of environmental personhood both domestically and internationally. The second post explores the concept of legal personhood for rivers with a focus on two rivers that have already been granted personhood — the Whanganui in New Zealand and the Atrato in Colombia.

“Legal personhood” can be conferred to non-human entities, essentially treating them as people for limited legal purposes such as allowing the entities to sue, own property, and enter into contracts. This is not a new concept as corporations have long been considered “legal persons.”  This then begs the question: if we can confer such legal protection to multi-billion dollar corporations, why can’t we do the same for the environment?

Environmental personhood is a subcategory of legal personhood that provides environmental entities the same status as a legal person, giving nature rights and asking courts of law to enforce those rights. The idea of legal personhood for natural resources is thought to have first come from the book, Should Trees Have Standing?, by Christopher D. Stone. This idea of resources having rights also reflects the influence of indigenous perspectives of understanding the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. The Western perspective of nature has resulted in a “legal regime of property-based ownership,” but by giving the environment personhood, it cannot be “owned” and has the right to appear in court to protect itself.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize “Rights of Nature” in its constitution, or specifically the rights of “Pachamama” (Mother Earth) to “maintain and generate its cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” Bolivia followed suit soon after in 2011 by passing new laws granting all nature equal rights to humans with The Law of Mother Earth, and in 2017, New Zealand made history as the first country to give a river legal personhood when it granted the Whanganui legal personhood with set representatives to take action on behalf of the river.

For rivers, when recognized as a legal person, its “inviolable basic right will be the right to flow freely” with the relevant ecological conditions creating the habitat to be respected and protected. A river has the right when granted personhood to maintain its “spirit, identity and integrity” and the right to “flow (unhindered), meander, and to flood in its floodplains.” Legally, this gives a river the power to bring suit in its name, have its injuries recognized, hold polluters responsible for harms caused, claim compensation, and potentially secure other remedies.However, given the relative novelty of environmental personhood as a legal concept, there are still questions to be answered about the effectiveness of granting personhood and actual enforcement of the rights granted. Issues include trans-boundary natural features like rivers or governmental entities who were less friendly to the environment before acting as guardians. However, in New Zealand, there has been a unique approach where the representative body for the Whanganui River is made up both of Maori indigenous representatives, the government, as well as nongovernmental entities proactively working towards protecting the river. 

Additional Sources

• Legal Person, Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_person.
• Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Does “We the People” Include Corporations?, American Bar Associationhttps://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/we-the-people/we-the-people-corporations/.
• Cassandra Roxburgh, Environmental Personhood: A Radical Approach to Climate Justice, NonProfit Quarterly, (Mar. 7, 2022) https://nonprofitquarterly.org/environmental-personhood-a-radical-approach-to-climate-justice/.
• Alex Traub, Christopher Stone, Who proposed Legal Rights for Trees, Dies at 83, The New York Times, (May 28, 2021) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/us/christopher-stone-dead.html.
•  Ashley Westerman, Should Rivers Have Same Legal Rights as Humans? A Growing Number of Voices Say Yes, NPR (Aug. 3, 2019) https://www.npr.org/2019/08/03/740604142/should-rivers-have-same-legal-rights-as-humans-a-growing-number-of-voices-say-ye.
• John Vidal, Bolivia enshrines natural world’s rights with equal status for Mother Earth, The Guardian (Apr. 10, 2011) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/apr/10/bolivia-enshrines-natural-worlds-rights. 
• Shanthi Van Zeebroeck, Nature Rights: What Countries Grant Legal Personhood Status to Nature and Why?, Earth.Org (Oct. 6, 2022) https://earth.org/nature-rights/
• Rights of Nature FAQ, International Joint Commission, https://www.ijc.org/system/files/commentfiles/2019-10-Nicolette%20Slagle/FAQ.pdf
• Shrishtee Bajpai, River as a living entity, Frontline (Oct. 14, 2021) https://frontline.thehindu.com/environment/photo-essay-river-as-a-living-entity/article36984037.ece.
• Aikaterini Argyrou & Harry Hummels, Legal personality and economic livelihood of the Whanganui River: a call for community entrepreneurship, Water International, Vol. 44, 752 (Aug. 28, 2019) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02508060.2019.1643525.