LFN Researcher Alex May had a great time attending the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland's Environmental Rights Summit yesterday. He delivered a workshop about what Rights of Nature are, developments around the world, and how we might advance them in the UK.
The packed event brought together people working on the whole range of environmental issues across Scotland.
One of the focuses was on the Human Right to a Healthy Environment ('RtHE'), which is proposed to be included in the new Scottish Human Rights Bill and the ERCS have been running a strong campaign for. The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment gave a keynote speech, which included a mention of the link between the RtHE and Rights of Nature, as has been recognised by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in some jurisdictions in Latin America.
In our view, fulfillment of the RtHE means protection of the enviroment as a whole, and while this could be done through existing regulatory approaches, Rights of Nature is a stronger way to safeguard ecological integrity where approaches over the last decades have generally failed to do so. What is good for nature as a whole is good for humans!
The presentation was well received and inspired some great questions, including about land ownership, whether pushing for Rights of Nature might take momentum away from advancing Rights of Nature, the relationship between legal change and cultural change, and whether the master's tools can be used to dismantle the master's house.
We are really pleased that the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland is pushing forward on Rights of Nature and look forward to working with them more in the future.
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The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement in the UK has been newly revitalised over recent years. There was an early flurry of activity around 2005-2010, clustered around the UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA), which included some conferences, an excellent research report analysing the extent to which Wild Law already existed around the world, and annual Wild Law weekends (which continue!).
It felt very special to weave together powerful campaigns, community-led solutions, water meditation, song and ideas generation around system and consciousness shift at the #LCAW2023 event, "A Circle of Perspectives towards restorative and multispecies justice", organised and facilitated by Louise Romain (Circle of Voices), on behalf of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature with the participation of speakers from War on Want, PRALER (Planet Repairs Action Learning Educational Revolution).
