Earth Law Chronicles
Updates on Earth Law and the Rights of Nature Movement.
Earth Law Center is proud to announce joining the Ríos Protegidos initiative, a space that seeks to strengthen the protection of Chile’s rivers by applying existing tools, recognizing gaps and opportunities in river conservation and restoration, and promoting new legislation on protected and restored rivers. ELC’s Latin America Legal Program recently participated in a workshop to promote the conservation and permanent restoration of rivers in the Aysén region—a huge, sparsely populated area in southern Chile that is home to volcanoes, massive ice fields, and other natural wonders.
Since Earth law highlights our moral and sacred obligation to prevent species extinction and catastrophic ecosystem degradation, it places paramount importance on the fact that free-flowing rivers are essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and biodiversity.
A major court ruling on a case against Peruvian state oil company Petroperu, as well as the Regional Government of Loreto and other state entities, is expected in the coming weeks. It has the potential to establish the river as a rights-bearing entity, which would make it the next in a growing list of rivers in South America to have been recognized as having rights.
The Utah state legislature has in recent months been advancing anti-Rights of Nature legislation in the form of H.B. 249, which now awaits the governor’s signature. The bill, known as the “Utah Legal Personhood Amendments,” would explicitly prohibit state governmental entities from granting legal personhood to bodies of water, land, plants, nonhuman animals, and other categories—including artificial intelligence.
Earth law is the emerging body of law that will protect, stabilize, and restore the functional interdependence of Earth's life and life-support systems at the local, bioregional, and global levels. Earth law may be expressed in constitutional, statutory, common law, and customary law, as well as in treaties and other agreements both public and private.
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