In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to give nature legal rights in its constitution in an attempt to decenter humans, include indigenous voices, and prevent extractive environmental practices. Bolivia gave nature constitutional rights in 2010. India, New Zealand, and Colombia have all given specific rivers in their countries legal personalities (Guzmán, 2019). By giving nature constitutional rights, governments codify nature’s right to exist regardless of its value to humans. Through the legal system, anyone can argue for nature, and exploitative environmental activities can be halted when ruled as violating nature’s rights. Despite the limitations of working within a colonial framework of law, the rights of nature movement provides an alternative way to view nature, challenges Western ideals of ownership, and imagines a future outside of capitalism.

 

Legal rights of nature challenge Western notions of nature as an object that can be owned and used for one’s own benefit. Giving nature legal rights fundamentally questions the idea of property ownership and positions nature as an active subject, an entity with agency that cannot be used or controlled. The rights of nature movement envisions a non-anthropocentric future where the relationship between humans and nature is healed (Guzmán, 2019). Because the system of rights works within the framework of law, people must speak for nature in order to protect it. They thus engage in a relationship with nature, rather than simply taking care of nature. Instead of using technology to stop environmental degradation and working directly within capitalism to solve environmental issues, the rights of nature framework challenges the objectified, commodified status of nature under capitalism (Guzmán, 2019). Again, the rights of nature framework imagines a future of balance outside of a capitalistic, colonialist narrative, where nature is not essentialized or used for profit (Lalander, 2014). This subversion of capitalist narratives of ownership is rooted in indigenous activism in Ecuador and Bolivia.  

 

Indigenous ontologies of nature, such as the Kichwa concept of sumak kawsay, translated in Spanish as buen vivir, view everything as interconnected and having its own soul. These concepts position the earth as an active, living entity and reject the goal of limitless material growth and progress (Lalander, 2014). The rights of nature movement theoretically challenges the emphasis on material gain in capitalist nations. However, the concept of sumak kawsay is sometimes used to encourage the states’ planning and development, despite its inherent contradiction to these concepts. As an attempt to combat the problems with incorporating indigenous ontologies into a constitution based on colonial language of development, Ecuador prioritizes a decentralized, participatory approach (Lalander, 2014). While sumak kawsay and buen vivir theoretically subvert dominant ontologies of a passive earth in need of control, the essential nature of these concepts is sometimes ignored when included in states’ goals of development.

 

Similarly, while the inclusion of the rights of nature movement into an inherently colonial framework of law contradicts its essential decoloniality, the inclusion of indigenous voices helps destabilize the colonial rhetoric of law. As legal frameworks have been used across the globe  to justify and carry out colonialism, the subversive power of the concepts of buen vivir and sumak kawsay is reduced when included in the framework of law. However, the process of including rights of nature in Ecuador’s constitution only occured through indigenous led movements in the 1990s that rejected neoliberalism and demanded recognition and justice (Guzmán, 2019). The resulting constitutional drafting process included multiple indigenous groups and relied on their support, emphasizing the importance of participatory processes. Some argue that adding the rights of nature into Ecuador’s constitution challenges the colonial framework of law because it includes indigenous ontologies, uses a participatory process that recognizes non-Western epistemologies, and challenges fundamental Western ideals of ownership (Guzmán, 2019). Guzmán also discusses the problematic creation of “indigenous” as a homogenous category through colonization. Ecuador’s recognition of itself as a plurinational state, where multiple nations within one country are recognized, attempts to address this homogenization. Thus, the participatory process shifts the center of power by giving indigenous people authority over law and, in some ways, challenges the colonial framework of law.

 

Further complicating the issue, putting nature under the state's power makes truly resisting capitalism challenging. Ecuador’s and Bolivia’s constitutions both directly recognize pachamama and use this notion to give the earth rights, perhaps co-opting these concepts to fit the states’ agenda. Miriam Tola analyzes the concept of pachamama, the Andean conception of what Western people term Mother Earth. Tola (2018) argues that colonization has gendered and sexualized pachamama by imposing heteropatriarchal values onto it, shifting the conceptualization of earth to one of passivity and rendering the earth exploitable under capitalism and science (Merchant, 1981). Thus, the way pachamama is politicized by the state stands in opposition to the very essence of the concept. Bolivia’s use of the concept of pachamama reduces both the earth and women to their reproductive abilities and gives the state control and power over the earth (Tola, 2018). Tola argues against Bolivia’s misuse of pachamama, instead proposing that pachamama and the rights of nature be used to transcend the gender binary, display how the more-than-human world is connected, and prevent the literal and conceptual ownership of the earth. While the rights of nature movement theoretically moves beyond the ownership and commodification of earth, the way the concept is mobilized by the state in comparison to activists’ ideals essentializes the earth under the heteropatriarchal ownership of the state (Tola, 2018).

 

Practically, the rights of nature movement has had successes and failures in preventing exploitative environmental practices. Ecuador’s first successful court case concerning the rights of nature ruled in 2011 in favor of a river, after neighbors argued that a road widening project was damaging the riverbank. The court ruled that the provincial government must submit and enact a preservation and environmental repair project as well as issue a public apology (Greene, 2011). Most famously, Ecuador ruled in favor of nature to prevent oil drilling between 2007-2013 in Yasuni, a large region where many indigenous people live, instead requesting that other countries provide financial support in exchange for carbon credits. However, oil drilling began again in 2013, which the president justified by arguing that they needed the profit, meaning that the rights of nature framework only temporarily prevented oil drilling (Lalander, 2014). In Bolivia, the most controversial and well-known rights of nature case revolves around the construction of a highway through a protected indigenous area. Protesters stopped the project, but a few months later the government provided contradictory messages about whether the project would continue or not, and the highway has since been constructed (Lalander, 2014). In the end, capitalist notions of progress and development won over the rights of nature, showing that legal protection may not be enough on its own. Thus, the rights of nature movement in Ecuador and Bolivia has had successes and failures in terms of its actual impact in protecting nature.

 

In theory, the rights of nature movement questions anthropocentrism, subverts colonialism, and challenges the dominant conception of the ownership of nature. Although when put into practice, the rights of nature movement still sometimes prioritizes capitalist development and colonial thought, the movement’s work shifting perceptions of earth to non-hierarchical and non-anthropocentric conceptions is essential to challenging the commodification and colonization of nature. It is also important for environmentalists to not co-opt indigenous theories for purposes that only privilege some groups of people. Despite the problems with rights of nature existing under states’ control, the fundamental concepts of sumak kawsay and Pachamama can be employed to resist some aspects of capitalism and shift people’s value systems in order to envision a future where all people and nature exist in harmony.