Standing for Nature: Legal Strategies for Environmental Justice

Rights of Nature laws are becoming a vital tool for addressing environmental injustice. From New Zealand and India to Ecuador and Bolivia, advocates have successfully secured legal rights for rivers, forests, and mountains. Granting rights to nature has the potential to expand environmental protections, strengthen indigenous rights, promote sustainable development, and alter how humans relate to nature. Despite these promises, rights of Nature laws have met with greater resistance in some countries than in others.

Standing for Nature offers advocates a blueprint for creating, implementing, and safeguarding rights of Nature laws. This book looks closely at four examples--New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh, and the United States--to explain why these laws have been successful in some places but not others. Through this comparative exploration, the authors highlight key strategies for advancing rights of Nature laws in the United States and around the world. These lessons include an examination of different legal traditions to better understand which is the best form of law--judicial, legislative, or regulatory--for advocates to target; how to ensure effective implementation once a law is passed; and how to shift communal perspectives on the human-Nature relationship for better implementation and enforcement.

This book is essential for environmental lawyers, policy makers, and advocates interested in gaining new knowledge and tools for championing rights of Nature laws in their own communities.

Dana Zartner is a professor in the International Studies Department and adjunct professor at the School of Law at the University of San Francisco. She has served as an accredited representative at UN meetings, including the Committee on Women’s Rights in New York and the Expert Mechanisms on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva. She is the author of Courts, Codes, and Custom: Legal Tradition and State Policy Toward International Human Rights and Environmental Law.

Fabian Cardenas is a professor of International Law at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and director of the Centre of Studies on Law and Sustainability. He has worked with the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Criminal Court in the The Hague.

Mohammad Golam Sarwar is an assistant professor of Law at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh and a doctoral researcher at SOAS, University of London. He has served as a legal consultant to the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UN Development Programme, and the International Labour Organization.