On the History and Future of the Rights of Mother Earth Declaration: An Interview with Doris Ragettli

This interview was conducted by Earth Law Center intern Ramia Waters in April 2025. It has been edited for clarity.

Doris Ragettli making a keynote presentation at the United Nations General Assembly on Harmony with Nature in 2018.

Hello, would you like to start by introducing yourself?

My name is Doris Ragettli, and I am the co-founder of Rights of Mother Earth, which started with a global petition asking the United Nations to adopt a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (RoME declaration).

In your bio on the Rights of Mother Earth website, you talk about taking cycling trips across the Rocky Mountains and witnessing the logging taking place there. This led to the moment you decided you wanted to “stand up for the protection of trees, waters, animals, the soil, the air and all living beings.” Before your trips, had you considered or participated in work or projects within environmental/biodiversity protection?

I had not directly participated in such projects, other than that I was a volunteer for a humanitarian organisation for many years. There, I saw the hard labour of people stuck in circumstances of hunger and whose lives were over and over and over destroyed by natural catastrophes. I volunteered for the Hunger Project, which made it their goal to end hunger in harmony with nature, which made complete sense to me.

After deciding you wanted to pursue environmental protection, what kind of work did you imagine undertaking, and where did you start in order to make that a reality? Did you anticipate that you would be campaigning for the adoption of a UN treaty that would establish rights for Mother Earth?

When I was still working with the Hunger Project, we did a campaign at the university in Zurich toward the end of the 1990s. It was called “Earth Summit in Rio—What Can We Do Here?” and that remained on my mind.

On that bike ride, when we saw those logging trucks coming down the mountains with tree trunks on them, and we were so sad that we cried at one point, it was like watching a funeral. It was then I decided I had to do something for Earth. I knew it had to be something that did not cost a lot of money. I had been thinking of doing something for a long time, and I’d thought I would need to start up an organisation, which of course would require money, staff, and so on, and this did not really go anywhere.

So instead I decided to start a petition because it was during the time that online petitions were becoming the fashion. I thought, “I could finance that, that shouldn't cost too much.” Then I thought I would take it to the second Earth Summit and deliver the signatures as the voice for Mother Earth. In my mind, every signature is like a declaration of love for our planet, and each one plants a seed of the Rights of Mother Earth in that person's heart.

In 1948, after World War II, the UN adopted the Human Rights Declaration (HRD) because humanity was suffering greatly at that time. The HRD became a milestone for the well being of humanity and informed many laws and education programs around the world. Today, Mother Earth is suffering great loss of natural habitats. We need the same commitment for the protection of Mother Earth. Human rights without the rights of the Earth are not sustainable.

It was in 2011 that you initiated the global signature campaign to get the United Nations to adopt the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. When initiating the campaign, what were your expectations? Did you anticipate that it would reach over 300,000 signatures?

Well our goal was one million—we just made the figure up. We had almost 117,000 signatures when we went to Rio for the Earth Summit, and we even kept collecting signatures when we were there. Obviously at that point we didn’t have anything close to a million yet, but the figure gave us something to go for, it gave us a game to play. We figured we would just go with what we had, and still this gave us a really strong drive. And then, after a while I was sort of thinking, “Oh dear, we promised we would have a million signatures but we haven't reached that goal.” But then we just decided, “Let’s just keep going.”

Upon reaching the goal of 1,000,000 signatures and delivering these to the United Nations, how do you think they will be received? What hurdles do you expect from this point?

My dream is for UN member states to put forward this call for a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, and then the signatures would back up that call from member states as the voice of civil society. Because we as civil society cannot put a declaration forward to the UN General Assembly. It has to be a UN member State.

So that’s my dream, and as you and many others will know, Bolivia already presented such a call in 2010. The country had drafted a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, which came out of the People’s Summit in Cochabamba. It was signed by 34,000 people including Indigenous Peoples, lawyers, organisations, and members of civil society. And this is now the declaration we are proposing as a document to inspire the UN when it commits to draft an official Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.

Do you have any specific plans or goals for the advancement of the RoME declaration before or during COP-30 (the next climate change COP)? If so, are there any significant focus areas of the upcoming climate change talks you feel will be significant for achieving these plans or goals? 

I am planning to go—that’s the first thing—and hoping to go with the Earth Law Center as well. This way we come with a common drive amongst our group of organisations. My dream is to have a voice within the official part of the conference. Usually the activism takes place outside the official summit meetings. I think it would be very impactful if we could have, like we did at the first summit, an opportunity to deliver at the final stakeholder meeting. If we could have such an opening again at the upcoming COP-30 in Belem, Brazil, that would be ideal.

What do you see happening in the next 5 years in the Rights of Nature movement? In addition to the RoME declaration, do you have any dreams for a future in harmony with nature?
The UN Harmony with Nature Program is working on the Earth Assemblies, which is very promising.

And then there are many, many more lawyers getting involved to work on really evolving the law. As has generally been the case, as society has evolved, law adapts to reflect this. As the law stands currently, Nature doesn’t have legal standing—and that is what needs to evolve. Then Nature will be included as a rights-holding entity, so we can defend Nature legally. When that happens, I think it will also function to prevent harm, because once corporations know they can be sued for harming Nature, they will hopefully take precautions to ensure they avoid such harms.