LATEST PRESS RELEASES FROM ELC

Earth Law Center (ELC) proudly congratulates Mrs. Marí Luz Canaquiri Murayari, a Kukama Indigenous leader from Peru, on receiving the 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize. She received this global recognition for her landmark achievement in securing legal personhood for the Marañón River, a critical tributary of the Amazon. As President of the Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (HKK), a federation of Kukama Indigenous women, Canaquiri led the legal battle to recognize the river’s inherent rights, ensuring its protection from industrial threats such as oil drilling and infrastructure projects.

PORT ANGELES, WA ~ On March 22, 2025, World Water Day, the Elwha Legacy Forests Coalition and Earth Law Center invite everyone to gather at Hollywood Beach in Port Angeles, WA at 11:00am to witness a welcoming and opening speakers, and enjoy music performed by Star Nayea, Indigenous Grammy award winning artist.  Special guest speakers include Frances Charles, Chairwoman of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, who was instrumental in bringing down the two dams that choked the Elwha River for over a century. Until October 2024, the Elwha River dam removal was the largest in US history, now surpassed only by the free flowing Klamath River.  

As countries prepare for the next round of global biodiversity negotiations at COP16, a new report, Ecocentrism in the Global Biodiversity Framework, outlines how developing countries, in particular the least developed countries and small island developing States, can secure portions of the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBF Fund) – intended to reach $200 billion per year by 2030 – to harmonize their legal systems with the laws of Nature under the framework of “Mother Earth centric actions.”

During the 2024 Climate Week NYC, Earth Law Center will host a live reading of the 1,000 year old story “The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity” at the AIA New York Center for Architecture. The play, which follows a group of animals who take humans to court for their poor treatment, alludes to the work of Earth Law Center and the broader Rights of Nature movement in ingraining the rights of animals and other natural entities into law.

New York, NY (July 27, 2023), Earth Law Center and partners proudly announce the soft launch of the Earth Law Portal, a groundbreaking digital platform designed to empower environmental advocacy and drive action for the protection and restoration of the planet.