One Origin Story

The orthodox rights of nature story begins in a University of Southern California lecture hall in October 1971. To rouse his weary property law class, professor Christopher Stone veered off-course and into a provocation: What if nature could represent itself in court?

The ploy worked: students peppered Stone with objections. He left determined to find a test case—and he wouldn’t even need to leave the state.

Two years earlier the U.S. Forest Service had accepted a bid from Walt Disney Productions to build a $35 million ski resort in California’s Mineral King Valley, but the Sierra Club sued to stop construction on environmental grounds. The case hinged on whether the Sierra Club had standing, which required demonstrable personal injury resulting from the proposed resort. The U.S. Supreme Court was about to decide.

Stone rushed an article to the Southern California Law Review. The editor accepted it, and on November 17, 1971—the day of court arguments—sent a synopsis to justice William Douglas, who was writing the foreword for an upcoming Review edition.

In “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone argues that nature should be allowed to defend itself in court, represented by human guardians. Given that ships and corporations already possess such rights, Stone writes that it is “no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak.”

The court’s majority was unswayed, ruling against the Sierra Club. But while conservationists lost the case, they won the fight: regulatory barriers and environmental opposition eventually forced Walt Disney to abandon the resort.

It was a dissenting opinion by Douglas, drawing heavily on Stone, that would make the case famous, first in legal circles and later in the rights of nature movement. This was no coincidence; Stone and the Review editor had conspired with Douglas’s clerk to feed Douglas the draft at the critical moment.

So it was that the first rights of nature proposal in Western law appeared—and was duly lampooned. California lawyer John Naff taunted it in verse:

If Justice Douglas has his way—
O come not that dreadful day—
We’ll be sued by lakes and hills
Seeking a redress of ills.

Naff continued:

Ah! But vengeance will be sweet,
Since this must be a two-way street.
I’ll promptly sue my neighbor’s tree
For shedding all its leaves on me.

A Wider Confluence

Time has been kinder to Stone, who is routinely celebrated as nature rights’ founding father. But his article is best considered one link in a longer genealogy.

One tenet of the rights of nature movement is that Indigenous belief systems have shaped and should continue to shape it. The idea that nonhuman nature has agency and intrinsic value is integral to many animistic Indigenous cultures that understand humans as one of various social beings—alongside plants, animals, and natural landmarks—in reciprocal relationships.

Nature rights also owe much to Western ideas predating Stone. Prussian polymath Alexander von Humboldt, drawing on his travels through the Ecuadorian highlands and wider South America, describes nature as an interconnected “web of organic life” in his 1845 masterwork, Cosmos. Throughout the 19th century, transcendentalists including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and John Muir extolled nature’s intrinsic value. And Douglas’s dissent quotes Aldo Leopold’s 1949 “The Land Ethic”: “We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

Western conservation has historically rested on human-centered (anthropocentric) reasoning, but intrinsic (ecocentric) arguments have steadily spread since von Humboldt’s time. For example, Yellowstone, the first U.S. national park, was created in 1872 as a “pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” By contrast, the 1994 California Desert Protection Act’s rationale for creating the Death Valley and Joshua Tree parks blended anthropocentric and ecocentric language, citing “unique scenic, historical, archaeological, environmental, ecological, wildlife, cultural, scientific, educational, and recreational values.”

By 1973 German Chilean lawyer Godofredo Stutzin was explicitly advocating for nature’s rights. Surpassing Stone, Stutzin argued that humans couldn’t grant nature rights, but merely recognize them as already extant given nature’s intrinsic moral value. In Understanding the Rights of Nature (2022), philosopher Mihnea Tănăsescu notes that for Stone, nature’s personhood was a pragmatic legal idea; for Stutzin, it was a literal phenomenon demanding recognized rights.

Stutzin’s work is less famous than Stone’s today, but arguably more relevant. In The Great Work (1999), self-described “geologian” Thomas Berry echoes Stutzin’s arguments about nature’s intrinsic moral value. In turn, environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan’s influential book Wild Law (2002) draws extensively on Berry in advocating “Earth jurisprudence”: law and governance understanding nature as a single, interconnected “community of beings” with ecocentric rights (for instance, the right to exist) that humans must recognize and balance with anthropocentric rights (such as owning property).

Recent scholarship analyses nature rights not just as philosophical proposals or legal innovations, but political contests. In The Politics of Rights of Nature (2021), Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin explore how political, legal, and cultural realities turn theoretical models into diverse regional configurations. For Tănăsescu, too, power is integral to understanding the movement’s potential.

Intag Uprising

Sometime in the early 1990s, while DeCoux was establishing the Los Cedros scientific station and reserve, a Japanese man appeared in the Intag Valley, exploring the foothills around the town of Junín. Locals eventually identified him as a prospector hunting minerals for Japanese company Bishi Metals, which had secured a concession to mine in the area. His appearance ignited Latin America’s longest-running anti-mining resistance, engulfing communities from the Intag Valley to Los Cedros and the neighboring Manduriacos region.

An information war ensued: Bishi Metals promoting open-air copper mining versus locals lamenting its ecological harm. In 1997 the Organization for the Defense and Conservation of Intag (DECOIN), founded two years earlier to organize resistance, uncovered a Bishi Metals impact assessment forecasting extensive deforestation, waste deposits, water contamination, and the displacement of 100 families. Enraged, community members demanded a meeting with the company, but to no avail.

In May 1997, 87 locals hiked miles uphill from Junín to the Bishi Metals basecamp. On arrival they seized all the property they could carry, from dinner plates to geological equipment, and again demanded a meeting. Three days later, having received no response, they marched again. This time they evicted the guards and burned the camp to the ground. They erected a sign amid the wreckage: “Not Another Step Forward for the Mining Companies.” Weeks later Bishi Metals abandoned the project.

Between 2004 and 2009 this process replayed with a vengeance, this time with Canadian company Ascendant holding the Junín concession. Ascendant promised health programs and infrastructure projects and offered handouts to supporters. Opponents decried short-term payment for long-term destruction and erected roadblocks. Communities and families fractured along mining fault lines. In December 2005, 300 community members voted to burn down Ascendant’s Chalguayacu Bajo facility.

Violence bred violence. Activists started receiving regular death threats. In October 2006 police raided DECOIN founder Carlos Zorilla’s house, allegedly planting a gun in his son’s bedroom and drugs in the living room. That December more than 100 mining paramilitaries assailed a roadblock with tear gas and bullets, one of which landed in a local’s leg. Villagers retaliated by capturing and detaining 56 of them. When local officials tried to collect the detainees, a pro-mining group attacked them with bullets, burning tires, and Molotov cocktails. The resulting media spectacle and anti-mining marches on Quito drove the government to suspend Ascendant’s activities in September 2007, then cancel their contract in November 2008.

A Groundbreaking Constitution

The Intag Valley’s distinct geographic and social history has shaped its anti-mining resistance—remoteness has limited state presence and fostered a frontier spirit with strong solidarity among residents.

But Intag is also a microcosm of Ecuador, whose economy has long relied on natural exports: cacao, bananas, shrimp, oil, minerals. This reliance exposes the country to price swings; oil collapses triggered economic crises in 1982, 1998, and 2017.

Resource extraction has also wrought environmental devastation, often by multinational corporations in Indigenous territory, emboldened by Investor State Dispute Settlements that allow international investors to sue host governments for harming their investments. These dynamics have generated growing resistance in recent decades from Ecuador’s maturing environmental movement and a political coalition of its 14 Indigenous nations.

In 2006, with the Intag Valley embroiled in conflict, economist Rafael Correa rode this groundswell to a presidential election heralding a “citizens’ revolution.” The revolutionary blueprint would be a new constitution—the third since Ecuador returned to democracy in 1979—forged by 130 delegates, 1,632 written submissions, and 70,000 visitors to the Constituent Assembly in Montecristi.

The constitution’s political genesis helps explain its preamble, which promises “a new form of public coexistence, in diversity and in harmony with nature, to achieve the good way of living, the sumak kawsay.” Sumak kawsay (“good living”) is an Indigenous Kichwa concept rooted in reciprocal relationships with animate nature. Indigenous worldviews had gained hard-won influence.

In September 2008 the Ecuadorian people shocked the legal and political worlds by ratifying the first constitutional rights of nature. Articles 71–74 grant nature (“where life is reproduced and occurs”) rights to existence and to “maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes”; to restoration; and to preventive measures on activities that “might lead to” species extinction, ecosystem destruction, or permanent alteration of natural cycles.

Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous observers alike saw Articles 71–74 as markers of growing Indigenous recognition and influence. But ratification also required political lobbying that emphasized their compatibility with liberal rights. Uruguayan intellectual Eduardo Galean and key Correa ally Alberto Acosta wrote articles harmonizing indigenous thinking and the language of rights. The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, fresh from pioneering the first U.S. rights of nature ordinance in Pennsylvania’s Tamaqua Borough, helped representatives draft constitutional provisions. Environmentalists cited Stone behind the scenes. Ultimately, the prospect of a marginalized country making constitutional history garnered cross-party support for concerns beyond the health of Ecuador’s ecosystems or Indigenous communities.

However, legal rights don’t obviously follow from sumak kawsay; they are at best a rough Western translation. The assembly’s Indigenous representatives saw nature rights per se as self-evident or secondary to material concerns, such as Indigenous territorial sovereignty. Their support for Articles 71–74 didn’t signify wholesale acceptance of nature rights as a route to social and environmental change but strategic acceptance of the political recognition, however imperfect, of Indigenous culture.

Equating rights of nature with Indigenous beliefs acknowledged culpability and offered redemption for Ecuador’s colonial extractive history while simultaneously reinforcing a Western rights narrative. “What was forgotten,” writes Tănăsescu, “was that the universal history of rights has nothing to do with Indigenous philosophy.”

And far from quelling conflict in mining country, Articles 71–74 simply changed some rules of engagement. Disputes over what they might mean for Ecuador’s Indigenous communities and ecosystems soon followed—and ultimately would help lay the groundwork for a governmental assault on the constitution itself.

The Rightness of Rights, the Nature of Nature

What is nature? As Tănăsescu writes, “There are many different worlds that are flattened and smashed together by the idea of Nature.”

Ecuador offers a broad definition: “Where life is reproduced and occurs.”

But where does nature start and culture end? Is, say, a patch of Amazon rainforest landscaped with ancient Indigenous earthworks, waterways, and agroforestry still nature? The answers to such knotty questions shape rights of nature legislation and can shift with prevailing political winds.

Whatever nature is, where do its rights stem from? Ecuador enshrines rights for all of nature. Laws elsewhere, however, rest on specific characteristics, generating more targeted protections. For example, New Zealand’s 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act recognizes the Whanganui River as a legal person with corresponding rights, including rights to life and decision-making power (exercised via two human representatives called Te Pou Tupua). The act understands the river as an interconnected ecosystem, but because it partly grounds protections in the river’s ancestral status to the Whanganui iwi people, it doesn’t protect nature beyond that ecosystem.

Which rights should nature have? Ecuador recognizes nature’s rights to exist, function, and be restored, but laws elsewhere go further. For example, some U.S. ordinances recognize nature’s right to “flourish.” In 2024 the Yurok Tribal Council in northern California granted the Heyhl-keek ‘We-roy, or Klamath River, property rights over its data.

Rights require enforcement. So who should defend nature, and how?

Ecuador allows anybody, regardless of nationality, to represent Ecuadorian nature in Ecuadorian courts. This sounds comprehensive, but critics think it lacks the proactive attention of “guardianship” models, such as the Te Awa Tupua Act, that mandate human representatives to monitor and defend specific places. Though guardianship models risk creating ethical hierarchies—elevating the Whanganui above other rivers, for example—proponents argue they encourage governance structures responsive to place-based politics and local expertise.

Enforcement questions abound. For example, upholding nature’s right to restoration triggers a measurement question: To what baseline? Should we restore a river to its “natural” state, precipitating both a definitional conundrum and dramatic upheaval? Or should it be returned to its state immediately preceding the rights violation, thereby risking “restoration” to ever-declining baselines?

Enforcing rights also means balancing rights. Ecuador’s constitution enshrines a panoply of human and nature rights, but scant guidance on prioritization. In practice this grants the judiciary power to adjudicate between, say, an ecosystem’s right to exist (Article 71) and a person’s right to “develop economic activities individually or collectively” (Article 66). It also invites the question of whether nature’s rights would apply to, say, “pests” or viruses.

A False Dawn

“Often, a significant cultural change must occur for jurisprudence to adequately develop,” writes constitutional judge Ávila Santamaría. In Ecuador it soon became clear that new legal norms alone were no ecological panacea.

In January 2009, three months after Ecuador’s constitution took effect, Correa signed a sweeping law enabling large-scale mining nationwide, even invoking a constitutional clause permitting presidentially authorized resource extraction in protected areas in times of exceptional national interest. He argued that mining revenues were critical for realizing the constitutionally enshrined sumak kawsay through high welfare spending.

This “neo-extractivist” strategy, as critics labeled it, triggered fierce backlash and alienated Correa’s Indigenous–environmentalist electoral axis. But he pressed on. “We cannot be beggars sitting on a sack of gold,” he later proclaimed. He also circulated an extraordinary memo declaring that judges must personally reimburse state costs stemming from undue courtroom delays to extraction projects.

Doubtful of judicial impartiality under such political pressure, rights of nature proponents confined test cases to lower courts. Here, judges’ inexperience in applying nature’s new rights within the constitution’s ambiguous rights hierarchy meant that jurisprudence emerged slowly and patchily.

Meanwhile, the Intag Valley was undergoing another cycle of conflict.

In 2011 Chilean mining giant Codelco partnered with the Ecuadorian state mining company, ENAMI, to secure the Junín concession. Resistance grew, and in September 2013 locals blocked ENAMI technicians from commencing exploration. In April 2014 Junín community leader Javier Ramirez was taken without a warrant and detained for 10 months for allegedly attacking ENAMI officials, despite witness testimony stating otherwise. Ramírez was released amid outcry from community members and human rights organizations, but only after being convicted and sentenced to 10 months (conveniently backdated to match his detention) for “sabotage and rebellion against the state.” A month after his release, hundreds of police broke a community roadblock to establish an exploratory mining camp. Over the weeks that followed they arrested several more anti-mining activists.

Articles 71–74, it was clear, couldn’t protect these advocates or bridge deepening community divisions. Families were torn apart. Some who had burned mining camps a decade earlier—including Ramirez’s own cousin—swapped allegiances, swayed by Correa’s narrative and mining income.

Correa left office in 2017, though not before quietly granting mining concessions covering 2.9 million hectares, including swaths of the Intag Valley. ENAMI and Canadian company Cornerstone secured two concessions encompassing 68% of Los Cedros. The mining threat had multiplied—and the supposedly protected cloud-forest was in the crosshairs.

The Case of the Century

Cornerstone and ENAMI arrived to survey Los Cedros in July 2017. Prospectors hiked in with drills and maps; helicopters droned overhead.

DeCoux, ever vigilant, sounded the alarm and requested inspections. The environment ministry and local municipality both obliged, finding trail clearing and tree felling exceeding allowances in the environmental management plan. In May 2018, two nights after an inspection, unidentified thieves infiltrated the scientific station and stole a computer and cell phone.

If the theft was intended to intimidate, it backfired: DeCoux secured a criminal lawyer and persuaded the municipality to file a constitutional protection action to stop the mining activity on the grounds that it violated nature’s rights and local communities’ right to prior consultation. The municipal judge dismissed the case as an administrative issue. But the plaintiffs appealed, and the provincial court agreed that ENAMI had failed to properly consult the community.

ENAMI’s decision to countersue, claiming its right to legal certainty had been violated, was a blunder: it helped persuade Ecuador’s Constitutional Court to take up the case in May 2020 as a chance to clarify enforcement of Articles 71–74. The land’s highest court would rule on Los Cedros’s rights.

While the case gestated in the lower courts, Lenín Moreno was elected president. Though a nominal socialist committed to environmentalist policies, after assuming office Moreno shifted rightward and embraced large-scale mining. He distanced himself from Correa by establishing a 2018 council to review political corruption. The panel dismissed all nine Constitutional Court judges and initiated a transparent reappointment process. Among the new judges were Agustín Grijalva Jiménez and Ramiro Ávila Santamaría.

In October 2020, protesters gathered outside Quito’s Constitutional Court for a public hearing on Los Cedros’s fate. Some wore hard hats and high-vis vests, holding banners and tooting vuvuzelas in support of mining the forest. But most sang, danced, and rapped against mining to the beat of drums and strum of guitars.

With Ecuador gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic, testimonies unfolded not inside the courthouse, but over Zoom. Los Cedros’s local mayor opened proceedings in Kichwa. Mining ministers and Cornerstone representatives defended mining plans, but most witnesses defended the forest’s rights. A procession of eminent scientists detailed the forest’s ecology. Jose Cueva, the activist coffee farmer, testified, as did Correa’s old ally Alberto Acosta. For weeks afterward, the judges considered submissions from scientists, NGOs, artists, and Intag Valley residents.

When Grijalva Jiménez and his fellow judges delivered their ruling on December 1, 2021, it reverberated around the world like a howler monkey’s roar: mining in Los Cedros violated the forest’s rights and must cease.

The decision cast Articles 71–74 as “not rhetorical lyricism, but . . . a historic commitment” to follow, in the constitution’s words, “a new way of living together as citizens, in diversity and harmony with nature.” Here, finally, was binding constitutional jurisprudence articulating Ecuador’s nature rights in practice. “This ruling is as important to nature as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man were to our own species,” hailed biologist Mika Peck.

Grijalva Jiménez later acknowledged that the “strong voice of life” emerging from the testimony was “stronger than even the legalistic framework” in guiding the decision. “If you see all that biodiversity, all that life, emotions play a role,” he said.

Winning the case of the century required constitutional rights—“our huge advantage,” in Jiménez’s words. But just as the 2008 constitution was specific to Ecuador’s political history, the 2021 ruling was specific to Los Cedros. It took generations of political groundwork across the Intag Valley and Ecuador; decades of effort establishing the Los Cedros Reserve and its international support networks; years of piecemeal jurisprudence; and a chorus of testimony from Indigenous leaders, local villagers, international scientists, legal allies, and concerned artists. All of this to win a battle, but not the war.

Another False Dawn?

Mining companies may have left Los Cedros, but their specter lingers in bitterly divided communities, the threat of legal and political countermoves, and a darkening national mood.

“I keep expecting to hear that Josef has been murdered,” environmentalist Natalia Greene told MacFarlane, the writer, after the ruling. “There are people who want that forest for money, who are angry at his protection of the forest, at the rights of nature ruling. It would be simple to say he was drunk, he fell over.”

Before leaving, Cornerstone fired 40 local workers—“effectively 40 families,” notes Cueva—including Los Cedros Reserve volunteers co-opted for salaried community relations work. Forgoing mining money, in wages and development projects, hits communities hard, despite the reserve’s and DECOIN’s efforts to seed economic alternatives, such as coffee growing, ecotourism, and craftmaking. DeCoux recognized that Cornerstone’s campaigning meant the 2021 ruling had actually heightened danger for Los Cedros’s defenders. “I had the communities on my side, but today they’re after my throat,” he told MacFarlane.

Los Cedros’s health also remains uncertain. Legal activist Rodríguez-Garavito’s 2024 evaluation report notes that beyond ending Los Cedros mining operations, government compliance with the ruling—which among other things mandated staff training around issuing environmental permits and quarterly site visits—has been patchy. Moreover, pollution from nearby mines threatens to cross the reserve’s boundaries.

Danger swells far beyond the Intag Valley, too. Since 2021 Ecuador’s murder rate has ballooned almost sixfold, partly stemming from illegal mining controlled by drug gangs, whose growing power and violence has driven the country into crisis. Militarized legal mining zones, protest suppression, and rights abuses against humans and nature are also escalating concerns. However, most hotspots lack Los Cedros’s support networks, media draw, and fundraising capacity.

The latest and most ominous threat comes from President Daniel Noboa, a right-wing autocrat overseeing a mano dura (“iron fist”) crime crackdown, government-efficiency drives, and pro-market reforms.

In September 2025, in all-out assault on Ecuador’s environmental protections, Noboa announced a referendum to reform or replace the country’s pioneering constitution under the guise of reducing crime. The referendum also contained proposals to allow foreign military bases (U.S. bases, in practice) on Ecuadorian soil, slash the number of members of parliament, and end the state’s obligation to fund political parties.

On November 16, in a striking rebuke, Ecuadorians voted down all proposals, with 62% rejecting constitutional changes—despite the “Yes” campaign’s government backing and superior spending. “The vote reflects a collective intuition: our Constitution—with all its flaws and its many pending tasks—remains a global beacon for ecological jurisprudence,” Greene reflected. “The health of Ecuador’s environment and the credibility of a worldwide movement are intertwined.”

Ecuador’s constitution may have survived, but other actions threaten the force of Articles 71–74. Noboa has announced plans to expand private ownership of national parks and forest reserves, auction off 49 Amazonian oil and gas sites, and combine the environment ministry with the Ministry of Energy and Mines (“putting the wolf in charge of the sheep,” in Greene’s words).

His Organic Law on Intelligence, enacted in June, dramatically expands state surveillance of citizens. Other measures, ostensibly to combat money laundering and “unjustified private enrichment,” have targeted and hindered the work of environmental and rights NGOs. In response to Constitutional Court challenges to these moves, Noboa vilified the court’s judges through media and rallies and all but called for their impeachment.

Meanwhile, efforts to use Los Cedros’s example to strengthen rights of nature legislation have faltered since 2021. “Rights of nature is strong in civil discourse, but very weak in political discourse,” says Ávila Santamaría. In the present political climate, that seems unlikely to change.

There have been hopeful moments, even before the emphatic referendum result. In 2023 the Constitutional Court ruled that Codelco and ENAMI’s Junín mining concession also violated nature’s rights. The ruling referenced Los Cedros as a precedent and was partly based on the discovery of an endemic frog species named, by popular poll, the Intag resistance rocket frog.

Nevertheless, Ecuador’s experience shows that even constitutional rights can be fragile. Are there other ways?

From Rights to Relationships

Across the Pacific Ocean, on New Zealand’s north island, rises a mountainous expanse of forest called Te Urewera. In 2014 the Te Urewera Act settled a long-running sovereignty dispute between the Crown and the Tūhoe tribe, which considers Te Urewera its ancestral home.

The act only covers the forest. It formulates Te Urewera as a self-owning legal entity, not a being with rights. And its primary purpose is to settle competing sovereignty claims, not to enhance ecological outcomes. However, the act—parts of which are written only in Māori to avoid misinterpretation—arguably surpasses Ecuador’s constitution in empowering the Indigenous community and protecting its nonhuman subject.

A Tūhoe-majority board represents Te Urewera according to Tūhoe custom, which rejects rights as tools of Western conquest. Instead, the act’s governance plan emphasizes human responsibilities to unlearn harmful behaviors and relearn traditional Tūhoe practices as guardians (kaitiaki). Kaitiaki do not make decisions for the forest and are not necessarily human. Rather, they are human, animal, or spiritual conduits able to sense and relay what Te Urewera—a living being—is communicating.

To the Tūhoe, Te Urewera’s true human kaitiaki are not board members, but “bush crews” living in reciprocity with and listening to the forest through ancestral, animistic practices under elder tutelage. All board decisions are made by consensus alongside bush crews, elders, and other experts.

Tāmati Kruger, who led negotiations for the Tūhoe, described the act as “management of people for the benefit of the land. It is not about land management.” For Tănăsescu, making “the person look insignificant” in legislation made to give nature a voice “is something truly revolutionary.” The act has produced several improvements in how human activity in Te Urewera is managed, including lower-impact road building, ecologically sound possum-population control, and stricter requirements when fishing and camping.

None of this makes the Te Urewera Act superior to Ecuador’s constitution. But it does show rights to be a means, not an end.

Rodríguez-Garavito embraces that idea. “I see rights of nature as one component in what I call . . . the legal grammar of animacy,” he says, riffing on Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer’s idea that we must relearn how to speak about nature to see it as an animate being.

A legal grammar of animacy and a broader cultural grammar of animacy both require two values that rights easily miss: responsibilities beyond upholding rights for the sake of upholding rights, and reciprocity between humans and nonhumans. For Rodríguez-Garavito, this demands an “ecological turn”: diverse disciplines working to rekindle nonhuman agency to improve ecological outcomes.

This work includes efforts to decode whale and honeybee language using artificial intelligence; science illuminating fungi and slime mold intelligence; experiments in interspecies democracy and nonhuman property ownership; and mechanisms for rewarding nonhuman contributions to art and design. Rights, ever buffeted by political winds, cannot rebalance the relationship between humans and nonhumans alone.

Friends for the Days Ahead

Those gathered in DeCoux’s hut disperse over the days that follow, each forging a different path through the rights of nature movement and the wider ecological turn. Cueva and Vásquez rejoin life and resistance in the Intag Valley. The judges return to the legal fight in Quito. DeCoux, pestered by his dogs and cats, stays to continue his remarkable vigil, which will be ended by cancer in May 2024.

MacFarlane, Rodríguez-Garavito, Furci, and Sheldrake follow a guide up a steep, overgrown trail to a camp near the Río Los Cedros’s source. There, MacFarlane ponders what grammar might capture rivers’ aliveness and so help us treat them as living. Furci, her sixth sense tingling, scans for fungi in the endless green. And bam! A new species of Protostropharia hiding by the path, erumpent. It will strengthen the 2021 ruling. Mycorrhizal fungi are inseparable from their habitat, she explains later, so “there is huge potential to protect large habitats based on giving rights to a fungus.”

Sheldrake pokes his microphones into earth and trees. One fireside afternoon this inspires an interspecies jam. The result, “Song of the Cedars,” is a collaboration between bat, toucan barbet, howler monkey, cricket, leaf, soil, and human. In October 2024 its five creators—four human, one forest—will petition Ecuador’s copyright office to recognize Los Cedros’s moral authorship. In May 2025, after an expected rejection, they will appeal to take the issue to court.