A recent column in the Lakota Times by Professor Victoria Sutton (Lumbee), a law professor at Texas Tech University, offers one of the clearest and most grounded surveys of where the rights of nature movement stands today in the United States. Her piece, Do Rivers Have Rights?, traces the legal and intellectual lineage of river rights from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic through Justice William O. Douglas’s famous 1972 dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, and into the present wave of tribal laws, local ballot initiatives, and state-level fights that are reshaping how Americans think about water.
The conversation is also moving well beyond the margins of U.S. legal debate. In March, the UK House of Commons Library published a research briefing, Rights of Rivers, another sign that questions once treated as fringe are now entering mainstream legal and policy discussion.
The Intellectual Roots
Professor Sutton begins with Christopher Stone’s 1972 law review article Should Trees Have Standing?, which asked whether natural objects could hold legal rights enforceable in court. That same year, Justice Douglas took up the question in his dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, arguing that environmental disputes should be litigated in the name of the natural objects themselves, with a guardian appointed to represent their interests. At the time, the idea was treated as radical. Fifty years later, it is much harder to dismiss.
But as Professor Sutton notes, Western legal theory was not inventing this way of thinking from scratch. Many Indigenous legal traditions have long understood humans as part of a living world ordered by reciprocal responsibilities. When Leopold articulated a similar ethic in A Sand County Almanac, he was giving Western ecological language to principles that many Indigenous peoples had already lived and practiced. That convergence matters. It helps explain why the rights of nature movement draws strength from more than one legal and philosophical tradition.
Tribal Nations Out Front
The most significant development Professor Sutton highlights is the growing number of federally recognized tribes that have enacted rights-of-nature laws affecting rivers within or adjacent to their territories. She notes that at least eight tribes have now done so.
A few landmarks make the point clearly. The Yurok Tribe recognized the inherent rights of the Klamath River in 2019 and later enshrined those rights in tribal law. The Nez Perce Tribe recognized the rights of the Snake River in 2020. The Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin recognized the rights of the Menominee River that same year. In November 2025, the Colorado River Indian Tribes recognized the Colorado River as a living being with legal rights under tribal law. And in January 2026, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians passed a resolution recognizing the Longperson, the interconnected waters of their territory, as a living relative with the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and flow freely.
That framing matters. It reflects something deeper than strategy. It expresses a relational understanding of water that Western law has rarely known how to accommodate. When a river is understood as a living relative, the duty to protect it does not depend entirely on proving injury to a human owner, user, or downstream interest. The relationship itself carries obligations.
These tribal laws matter not only because they influence the broader public debate. They are exercises of tribal sovereignty in their own right. They are law.
The State of Play Beyond Tribal Law
Professor Sutton’s survey of state and local efforts is candid about the legal headwinds outside tribal jurisdictions. Toledo, Ohio, passed the Lake Erie Bill of Rights by ballot initiative in 2019, and a federal judge struck it down the following year. In Florida, Orange County voters approved a charter amendment recognizing rights of nature for two rivers, only to see those rights later blocked as preempted by state law. In North Carolina, bills recognizing the rights of the Haw River and the Dan River have been introduced in recent legislative sessions but have not advanced beyond committee.
The pattern is familiar to anyone working in this space: grassroots organizing, local adoption, then preemption, judicial narrowing, or both. Outside tribal law, the legal infrastructure for rights of nature remains contested and fragile in much of the United States.
And yet the momentum is real. Sutton points to the spread of local rights-of-nature measures and to the growing visibility of river-rights arguments in public discourse. That growing visibility matters, even when the legal path remains uneven.
Everett, Washington, and Standing for Nature’s Work
That is one reason Sutton’s mention of Everett, Washington stands out. In November 2024, Everett voters adopted Initiative 24-03, recognizing the Snohomish River watershed as a rights-bearing entity and giving community members standing to seek its protection in court.
Everett illustrates both the promise and the difficulty of this work. Public support was real. So was the backlash. The law was immediately met with the kinds of institutional resistance Sutton describes elsewhere: litigation, legal narrowing, and the familiar insistence that nature must remain outside the circle of enforceable rights.
For Standing for Nature, that is not abstract. It is part of our work. We know how hard these fights are. We also know they are part of a much larger legal and cultural shift, one that is being carried forward most clearly and powerfully by tribal nations.
A Closing Reflection
Justice Douglas wrote in Sierra Club v. Morton that those with an intimate relation to the natural world should be able to speak for it in court. Tribal nations are doing more than that. They are building and affirming legal systems in which rivers are recognized as more than property, more than scenery, and more than resources to be managed.
A recent Lakota Times column helped name that shift clearly. The challenge now is whether the rest of American law will continue resisting it, or finally begin to learn from it.
Read Professor Sutton’s full column here: Do Rivers Have Rights? in the Lakota Times.
Standing for Nature is a 501(c)(3) organization advancing the legal rights of natural entities and ecosystems. Learn more at standingfornature.org.
