Published on Thursday, September 4, 2008 by The Christian Science Monitor
Ecuador Constitution Would Grant Inalienable Rights To Nature
by Eoin O'Carroll
Ecuador's proposed constitution includes an article that grants nature the right to "exist, persist,
maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution" and
will grant legal standing to any person to defend those rights in court.
Voters will get to decide on Sept. 28 whether to adopt the new constitution, which would allow
the president to run for reelection, to dissolve Congress, and to exert great control over the
country's central bank. According to Reuters,
56 percent of Ecuadorians approve of the proposed document.
The blog Green Change quotes the five articles that acknowledge rights said to be possessed by
nature, or "Pachamama," a goddess revered by indigenous Andean peoples whose name roughly
translates into "Mother Earth."
1. Chapter: Rights for Nature
Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.
Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.
Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of
the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the
collectives that depend on the natural systems.
In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the
exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient
mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the
harmful environmental consequences.
Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.
Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead
to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the
natural cycles.
The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive
way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.
Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.
The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.
The concept that nature itself can possess rights runs counter to the classical liberal theories of
government that hold sway throughout much of the West, which view rights as possessed only by
individual human beings. But Ecuador is not the first country to propose granting rights to
nonhuman entities: Many countries, including the United States, have long held that corporations
possess many of the same rights - such as the rights to free expression and to due process - that
human beings have. And in June, Spain's parliament approved a measure to extend some human
rights to nonhuman apes.
But, as an editorial in the Los Angeles Times observes, Ecuador's extension of rights to nature
may represent a larger shift in how humans view their place in the world:
No other country has gone as far as Ecuador in proposing to give trees their day in court, but it
certainly is not alone in its recalibration of natural rights. Religious leaders, including the
Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Constantinople, have declared
that caring for the environment is a spiritual duty. And earlier this year, the Catholic Church
updated its list of deadly sins to include polluting the environment.
Ecuador is codifying this shift in sensibility. In some ways, this makes sense for a country whose
cultural identity is almost indistinguishable from its regional geography - the Galapagos, the
Amazon, the Sierra. How this new area of constitutional law will work, however, is another
question. We aren't ready to endorse such a step at home, or even abroad. But it's intriguing.
We'll be watching Ecuador's example.