Is a River Alive?

The Rights of Nature movement represents a fundamental shift in legal and philosophical thinking about the natural world, challenging the Western legal tradition that treats natural entities as property or resources rather than subjects with inherent rights. This movement seeks to establish legal frameworks that recognize ecosystems, rivers, forests, and other natural features as persons with legal standing comparable to corporations or individual humans.

The modern Rights of Nature movement traces its intellectual origins to USC law professor Christopher Stone’s spontaneous 1971 classroom question about whether trees could have legal standing. Initially met with ridicule, Stone’s idea developed into his influential 1972 paper “Should Trees Have Standing?” which argued that legal systems had historically expanded rights to previously excluded groups—from enslaved people to women to corporations—and could similarly extend personhood to natural entities.

However, the movement’s deeper roots lie in Indigenous worldviews that have long recognized natural features as living relatives rather than inanimate resources. Many Indigenous legal traditions across the globe—from Māori concepts of rivers as ancestors to various Native American tribal laws recognizing the personhood of natural entities—provided the philosophical foundation that Western legal scholars like Stone began to articulate in terms comprehensible to colonial legal systems.