The (Human) Rights of Nature: A Comparative Study of Emerging Legal Rights for Rivers and Lakes in the United States of America and Mexico (forthcoming)

Simple item page
dc.contributor.authorMacpherson, Elizabeth
dc.date.accessioned2021-09-08T21:01:51Z
dc.date.available2021-09-08T21:01:51Z
dc.date.issued2021en
dc.date.updated2021-08-26T00:31:52Z
dc.description.abstractAn international consensus of scientific experts is now demanding “immediate action” in response to the environmental, climate, and biodiversity crises. But are our legal and regulatory frameworks equipped to respond to the rapid pace of environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change? What incidence is there, transnationally, of laws that seek to protect the Earth from the humans that inhabit it? In the past few decades, there is a growing social, legal, and political movement towards more ecocentric regulation of the planet, where new laws and institutions seek to protect natural resources for their own intrinsic value. In this paper, I consider recent efforts to protect the rights of rivers in the U.S. and Mexico, which are novel and emerging attempts to discover new pathways for enhanced protection of vulnerable waterways. These attempts are being pragmatically driven from the bottom up to the highest levels of the legislature or judiciary as local communities (and sometimes Indigenous Peoples) become increasingly frustrated with apathetic and complacent governmental responses to environmental challenges, using whatever legal tools and processes are available to them. However, rather than an Earth-centred revolution, efforts to protect the rights of nature are distinctly “human”; as communities appeal to human rights laws, and their enhanced constitutional status, to upset the status quo. There are important lessons to be learned from these experiences in other countries in terms of the ability to entrench transformative environmental protections via constitutional hierarchies and the potential for the rights and interests of humans to be both an enabler of, as well as a threat to, nature’s rights.en
dc.identifier.citationMacpherson E (2021). The (Human) Rights of Nature: A Comparative Study of Emerging Legal Rights for Rivers and Lakes in the United States of America and Mexico (forthcoming). Duke Environmental Law & Policy.en
dc.identifier.issn1064-3958
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10092/102417
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAll rights reserved unless otherwise stateden
dc.rights.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10092/17651en
dc.subject.anzsrcFields of Research::48 - Law and legal studies::4802 - Environmental and resources law::480203 - Environmental lawen
dc.titleThe (Human) Rights of Nature: A Comparative Study of Emerging Legal Rights for Rivers and Lakes in the United States of America and Mexico (forthcoming)en
dc.typeJournal Articleen
uc.collegeFaculty of Law
uc.departmentSchool of Law
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
The (Human) Rights of Nature_ A Comparative Study of Emerging Legal Rights for Rivers and Lakes in the United States of America and Mexico.pdf
Size:
257.01 KB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Published version
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.71 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description:
Download
Collections
Law: Journal Articles