Welcome to the Anthropocene! May Nature Have a Seat? Human Rights, Rights of Nature, Environmental Personhood and Dignity: The Place of Nature in Law, and How Relationality Between Humans and Nature Matters

The anthropocentric approach of mainstream law underlies how the relationship between humans and nature and the chasm between the two is understood in law and thought. This paper addresses two core questions. Firstly, it investigates the place of nature and humans in law and how Environmental Personhood and Rights of Nature offer alternative ways of conceiving this relationship. It considers case law on the Rights of Nature from Ecuador and Environmental Personhood in New Zealand, and analyses how Indigenous cosmovisions have shaped the laws and jurisprudence in these related but different approaches to giving nature a seat at the table. The paper investigates how Indigenous cosmovisions of reciprocity and interrelatedness reconfigure a ‘Western’ understanding of nature in law, as a form of ‘ecosystem thinking.’ It further compares this relationality to the Human Right to the Environment, which approaches such an understanding through extending human rights. Secondly, the paper looks at how the human rights law principle of dignity should be extended to nature. It argues that it is crucial that nature is recognized as having an inherent worth independent of humans. The inherent worth of humans is linked to the idea of dignity, which it is argued could extend to nature to ensure that the environment is protected for its own sake. This paper also considers how the extension of dignity beyond humans is connected with the concept of relationality between humans and nature. Interconnectedness, in that sense, means that humans let nature into their systems, including law. The paper builds on a desk-based literature review and expert interviews, deepening the understanding of the most relevant aspects, and concludes that both rights-systems (Human Right to the Environment and Rights of Nature) aim at a reconfiguration of humans and nature in law. It argues for the idea of a ‘triangle’ in which Rights of Nature, human rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights interact and interconnect