In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can Be People (Legally Speaking)

2016-07-17

The concept of recognizing the legal rights of non-human beings, land, bodies of water and entire ecosystems is relatively novel. To people accustomed to the perspective of “Western civilization” relative to the relationship between humans and the ecosystem, or the perspective of biblical notions of human dominion over other beings and the land itself, this idea is probably silly or heretical. Some may even conclude “bullshit” or “hippies on drugs” or another left-wing conspiracy to destroy the USA.

This article tells us that a law in New Zealand granted rights to a certain parcel of land, and will do so to a river, that is Maori tribal land. Excerpt:

From 1954 to 2014, Te Urewera was an 821-square-mile national park on the North Island, but when the Te Urewera Act took effect, the government gave up formal ownership, and the land became a legal entity with “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person,” as the statute puts it.

“The settlement is a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world,” said Pita Sharples, who was the minister of Maori affairs when the law was passed.

It was also “undoubtedly legally revolutionary” in New Zealand “and on a world scale,” Jacinta Ruru of the University of Otago wrote in the Maori Law Review.

Personhood means, among other things, that lawsuits to protect the land can be brought on behalf of the land itself, with no need to show harm to a particular human.

A similar but much broader concept is embedded in the constitution of Ecuador. Ecuador was the first country in the world to codify the “rights of nature” by providing constitutional protection. Specifically, the Ecuadorian Constitution recognizes the inalienable rights of ecosystems to exist and flourish, gives people the authority to petition on the behalf of ecosystems, and requires the government to remedy violations of these rights.

Interestingly, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, in his dissenting opinion in the case of Sierra Club vs. Morton, proposed that the components of an ecosystem may have standing to independently protect themselves without the necessity of human intervention in the legal proceeding. He said:

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole—a creature of ecclesiastical law—is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.

Someday in the future, probably well beyond my tenure on this planet, I suspect that the indigenous peoples of the US, Canada and Mexico may take this approach to the lands they consider “theirs” or, if not theirs, then sacred.