page_title: Rights of nature
section_title: Underlying science and ethics
hierarchical_section_title: Rights of nature / Underpinnings and development / Underlying science and ethics
caption_attribution_description: English: Aldo Leopold, annual meeting of The Wilderness Society Council, Old Rag, Virginia, 1946.
context_page_description: Rights of nature is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights. The rights of nature concept challenges 20th-century laws as generally grounded in a flawed frame of nature as "resource", to be owned, used, and degraded. Proponents argue that laws grounded in nature's rights better direct humanity to act in a way consistent with modern, system-based science, which demonstrates that humans and the natural world are fundamentally interconnected.
  This school of thought is underpinned by two basic lines of reasoning. First, since the recognition of human rights is in part based on the philosophical belief that those rights emanate from humanity's own existence, so too logically do inherent rights of the natural world arise from the natural world's own existence. A second and more pragmatic argument asserts that humans' own survival depends on healthy ecosystems, and so protection of nature's rights in turn advances human rights and well-being.
context_section_description: Modern environmental laws began to arise in the 1960s out of a foundational perspective of the environment as best managed in discrete pieces. For example, United States laws such as the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, and numerous others began to be adopted in the early 1970s to address various elements of the natural world separately from other elements. Some laws, such as the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act, called for a more holistic analysis of proposed infrastructure projects, and required the disclosure of expected negative environmental impacts. However, it did not require that actions be taken to address those impacts to ensure ecosystem and species health.
  These laws reflected the science of the time, which was grounded in a reductionist analysis of the natural world; the modern, system-based understanding of the natural world, and humans' integrated place with it, was still in development. The first major textbook on ecological science, which described the natural world as a system rather than a collection of different parts, was not written until 1983. The Gaia Hypothesis, which offered a scientific vision of the world as a self-regulating, complex system, first arose in the 1970s. Systems dynamics similarly began to evolve from a business focus to include socioeconomic and natural systems starting in the 1970s. Since then scientific disciplines have been converging and advancing on the concept that humans live in a dynamic, relationship-based world that "den[ies] the possibility of isolation."
  While science in the late 20th century shifted to a systems-based perspective, describing natural systems and human populations as fundamentally interconnected on a shared planet, environmental laws generally did not evolve with this shift. Reductionist U.S. environmental laws passed in the early 1970s remained largely unchanged, and other national and international environmental law regimes similarly stopped short of embracing the modern science of systems.
  Nineteenth century linguist and scholar Edward Payson Evans, an early rights of nature theorist and author of "the first extensive American statement of (...) environmental ethics,” wrote that each human is “truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal, and [the] attempt to set him up on an isolated point outside of it is philosophically false and morally pernicious.”
  Thomas Berry proposed that society's laws should derive from the laws of nature, explaining that "the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects." From the scientific perspective that all life arose from the context of the universe, Berry offered the ethical perspective that it is flawed to view humans as the universe's only subjects, with all other beings merely a collection of objects to be owned and used. Rather, consideration of life as a web of relationships extending back to a shared ancestry confers subject status to all, including the inherent rights associated with that status. Laws based on a recognition of the intrinsic moral value of the natural world create a new societal moral compass, which directs society's interactions with the natural world more effectively toward well-being for all.
  Scientists who similarly wrote in support of expanded human moral development and ethical obligation include naturalist John Muir and scientist and forester Aldo Leopold. Leopold expressed that "[w]hen we see land as a community to which we belong," rather than "a commodity belonging to us," we can "begin to use it with love and respect." Leopold offered implementation guidance for his position, stating that a "thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Berry similarly observed that "whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good." Physician and philosopher Albert Schweizer's defined right actions as those that 
caption: Aldo Leopold, a scientist and forester, in 1946. He advocated to "see land as a community to which we belong" rather than as "a commodity belonging to us".[6][4][a]
exif: {}