Monday, December 06, 2021

rights of nature

Every once in a while we read in the news that a river here or a forest there has been granted legal rights, mostly the right not to be destroyed by human greed. Following a suggestion from one of the editors at Current Biology, I did a round-up of recent developments in rights of nature and examined whether it's more of a symbolic thing or actually helps protection.

My resulting feature is out now:

Reclaiming nature's rights

Current Biology Volume 31, Issue 23, 06 December 2021, Pages R1505-R1507

FREE access to full text and PDF download

See also my twitter thread listing all the 2021 features in Current Biology as they move to the open archives. I will keep this thread on twitter until the end of the year, but probably launch the new one for 2022 open archives on Mastodon, assuming that the decline and fall of the bird app continues.

The former nature reserve Te Urewera in New Zealand has now become a legal entity that effectively owns its land. (Photo: Department of Conservation, New Zealand/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

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