A growing coalition of wetland scientists, Indigenous communities, and legal advocates is pushing for something that may sound radical but is increasingly hard to argue against: the idea that wetlands deserve legal rights of their own.
A recent Inside Climate News investigation profiles this movement in compelling detail, and we at Standing for Nature think it deserves a close read — and a strong endorsement.
The Crisis We Keep Ignoring
The numbers are staggering. One-fifth of Earth’s wetlands have been destroyed. Of those that remain, a quarter are in ecological distress. Wetlands are disappearing three times faster than forests. Eighty-four percent of freshwater species have declined since 1970.
Yet most people — even the environmentally conscious — don’t fully grasp what wetlands do for us. They sequester more carbon per unit than forests. They filter pollution, recharge drinking water supplies, and buffer communities from flooding. They are, as the article puts it, Earth’s kidneys.
The current trajectory is not a slow drift toward trouble. It is an emergency.
Why Existing Law Has Failed
Massachusetts ecologist Gillian T. Davies spent decades publishing data, sounding alarms, and watching those alarms be ignored. She came to a conclusion that will resonate with anyone working in environmental law or advocacy: the data isn’t the problem. The legal framework is.
Existing environmental laws treat nature as a collection of resources to be managed — and managed for human benefit. That framing leaves ecosystems perpetually vulnerable to political shifts, economic pressure, and the assumption that nature’s value is purely instrumental. The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental protections is only the most recent and dramatic illustration of how fragile those protections have always been.
The rights of nature movement offers a different foundation: nature has inherent value and therefore deserves legal standing in its own right — not because it is useful to us, but because it exists.
Science Meets Indigenous Wisdom
One of the most powerful aspects of the movement described in this article is the partnership between Western scientists and Indigenous communities who have held this understanding for centuries.
The Kichwa people of Sarayaku in Ecuador, for instance, have long understood their forest-wetland territory as a living, communicating, rights-bearing entity. When they partnered with scientists like Davies and eco-hydrologist Matthew Simpson, both sides found something remarkable: their knowledge systems were pointing at the same truths. Underground fungal networks that Indigenous communities knew as the connective tissue of the forest were confirmed by science as mycorrhizal communication networks resembling neural systems. “Mother Trees” serve as community hubs, sharing nutrients and sending warnings — behaviors that exhibit hallmarks of intelligence.
This convergence isn’t just intellectually interesting. It is legally consequential. Ecuador’s constitutionalization of nature’s rights in 2008 — strongly influenced by its Indigenous movement — has since been used to defeat mining companies in dozens of lawsuits.
A Scientific Basis for Rights
What makes this moment particularly significant is that scientists are not just advocating for nature’s rights — they are providing the evidentiary and methodological backbone to enforce them.
Political scientist Craig Kauffman, who has analyzed over 450 rights of nature developments globally, argues that simply declaring legal personhood for nature isn’t enough. Rights must be grounded in scientific principles, defining what an ecosystem actually needs to survive and flourish. Panama’s 2022 national rights of nature law and its 2023 sea turtle rights law did exactly that — incorporating scientific data to define and operationalize those rights.
British ecologist Mika Peck has taken this further with Ecoforensic, an organization training local communities as “paraecologists” to build detailed evidentiary records about ecosystem health — records that carry more weight in court than the abbreviated environmental assessments typically submitted by developers. This approach has already helped cloud forests in Ecuador defeat mining companies.
What This Means for Standing for Nature’s Work
At Standing for Nature, we recognize that the legal system — water rights adjudications, environmental permits, conservation designations — remains one of the most powerful arenas for protecting the natural world. The rights of nature framework is not a departure from that work. It is its logical evolution.
The article makes clear that the movement is growing because the alternative — treating wetlands, rivers, and ecosystems as mere resources subject to human will — has produced catastrophe. It notes that today only 4 percent of Earth’s mammals are wild; the remaining 96 percent are humans and our livestock. We are not managing nature. We are consuming it.
Rights of nature laws reframe that relationship. They create legal standing for ecosystems, provide advocates with new tools for litigation, and — perhaps most importantly — invite a cultural shift in how people understand their relationship to the natural world.
As the article’s eco-hydrologist Matthew Simpson puts it, the first step is getting people to connect with nature on a daily basis — from their backyards to urban green spaces. That felt, personal bond is the foundation on which legal frameworks must ultimately rest.
A Note on the Political Headwinds
The article doesn’t shy away from the obstacles. At this summer’s Ramsar Convention on Wetlands in Victoria Falls, Sri Lanka’s resolution encouraging governments to recognize wetlands’ rights was rejected before the conference even began. The U.S. delegation — when it showed up at all — demanded deletion of references to climate change from summit documents. Russia withdrew entirely. China blocked any budget increase.
Political opposition to rights of nature is well-organized and, in some quarters, well-funded. Wisconsin lawmakers argued that rights can only be endowed by God to people — while conveniently omitting that Wisconsin law grants extensive legal rights to corporations.
Davies’ response to that memo is worth quoting: she noticed that the Declaration of Independence’s first paragraph references not just “God,” but “Nature’s God” — and wondered why the founders didn’t simply write “God.” For her, the distinction implies nature as something prior to, and encompassing of, the divine.
It is a question worth sitting with.
Read the Full Article
We strongly encourage you to read Katie Surma’s full investigation at Inside Climate News: The Scientists Making the Case for Nature’s Rights. It is one of the most substantive pieces of environmental journalism we’ve encountered on the rights of nature movement, and it reflects the kind of rigorous, hopeful thinking the moment demands.
The scientists profiled in this piece are not naive. They know they are fighting against enormous political and economic forces. But they are building something real: a legal framework rooted in ecological science and Indigenous wisdom, capable of giving nature a seat at the table — and a voice in court.
That is exactly the work we are trying to do here in Washington State. And we are not alone.
