“Ecosystems, wildlife and the Earth itself are living beings with inherent rights to exist, evolve and regenerate.” This, the Rights of Nature philosophy and movement, is led by Indigenous people worldwide who hold that humans are partners and guardians not owners of land, water and wildlife. Indigenous peoples perceive land, air and water as ancestors from whom they come. They identify who they themselves are through their rivers, their mountains, their forests who comprise their physical/spiritual life force. Behold stories of their successes for the world.
How did Māori Indigenous knowledge and persistence make the Whanganui River officially a living being and legal person in New Zealand? Theirs was almost a century and a half legal fight involving many generations. Thanks to the savvy of elders and more progressive politicians in the New Zealand government in the early 2000s their efforts achieved a treaty, The Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act, which recognized the river as a legal person. To the elders’ surprise the settlement has had global significance. One elder reflected that New Zealand is just a “speck in the sand” and their victory is an “opening for others around the world” to go and do the likewise for land, for forests, for mountains.
As a child growing up along the banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River, Yuvelis Morales Blanco learned to read the water. “Dark spots on the river,” (from an oil spill) “meant we were not going to eat.” Beginning in 2018, at 16 she became one of Colombia’s strongest activists for the Rights of Nature. By 2026, Morales Blanco was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize known as the Green Nobel Prize, for her fierce activism in stopping fracking in Colombia. She co-founded a youth-led anti-fracking organization in her hometown Puerto Wilches, which educates local fishers and farmers about all the environmental risks of fracking: including groundwater contamination, seismic activity, aquifer depletion, and serious human health impacts, within the ecosystem of the Magdalena River.
Their efforts reflect a broader legal and moral argument: “ecosystems like the Magdalena River should be treated not as resources to exploit, but as living systems with rights.” Nature gives us life, “I am the daughter of the river”; we cannot live without water, but we can without fossil fuels, Blanco insists. No matter who the people elects in 2026, be it a far right contender or the leftist senator, supported by Gustavo Petro, the current progressive president who has placed a moratorium on new oil and gas exploration, she vows to sustain her activism.
Blanco is one of six women recipients of the Goldman Award. “The solidarity and tenderness women bring forth is our salvation,” she averred.
In 2004, an Argentine company began drilling holes in the forest floor of Sarayaku, Ecuador, employing armed guards who attacked women and children and tortured four community leaders for peacefully protesting. From ancestral knowledge, the Kicha people of Sarayaku have always experienced the Amazonian forest as a “living, intelligent forest” filled with interconnected beings including lagoons, swamps waterfalls and trees — “not a collection of resources for humans to exploit” as the Western world mindset experiences it. A leader of the people, Jose Gualinga, had prepared and introduced an innovative declaration for a “new legal category for Nature: a living being with rights.” The strong, unified Indigenous movements of Ecuador succeeded in getting the Declaration of Kawsak Sacha, as it is called, into the country’s new constitution.
The Declaration of Kawsak Sacha has become an inspiration to some enlightened Western scientists, lawyers and activists, and it has influenced more laws around the world that recognize Nature as a living being pulsating with life and having rights. The Sarayaku have begun partnerships with wetland scientists, universities and lawyers to share Indigenous knowledge; and Carlos Fuentes, retired professor from Worcester State University, who has worked with the Sarayaku, praises these dialogues as “absolutely crucial to increase our chances of survival as a species on this planet.”
Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and outspoken advocate for the rights of Nature, writes that we can choose to enter a new era he names the Ecozoic era, if we seek and achieve a “sustainable balance with humans and the Earth.” He describes this sustainable balance as an intimacy with the Earth for which we need new sensitivities to see the story of the creation of the universe, culminating in human beings, as one in which we must be present on Earth as partners.
If we live well with the Earth, he says, we and the Earth on which we depend will thrive. If we do not and continue in ignorance or in hubris to destroy biodiversity as we are now doing and persist in rapidly accelerating climate change, we doom ourselves and the Earth together to genocide and ecocide.
Pat Hynes, an environmental engineer and feminist, is a member of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice. She acknowledges the debt of gratitude we owe Indigenous people for their wisdom and the remorse we must have for attempting to colonize them and destroy their sacred culture.