Spending time walking through a wooded park, away from scrolling through my electronic device, is a mandatory reset button for my mind that I need at least once a day to seek quiet, calm and emotional healing in nature. The walk can be as little as 10 minutes or, if my schedule allows, all morning. It's a humbling experience to see, touch, smell and hear the park. It allows a feeling of vastness outside my little identity in time and space. It gives me a healthy sense of awe.
I feel that awe simply by touching the earth and pondering that a small handful of soil contains more forms of microbial life than there are humans on the planet. I feel it through the vast underground network of mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots, nicknamed the "wood wide web," that connects individual trees and plants. This network allows organisms to trade nutrients, water and chemical warning signals across the ecosystem.
I also find awe in a single tall oak. Each of these beautiful trees can live for hundreds of years and maintain a stable habitat for generations of wildlife. A single oak is a life-support system, hosting more than 500 species of caterpillars and butterflies and providing more insect protein than any other tree. This oak's abundant acorns help mammals and birds survive the winter. Its root system helps reduce erosion, and its leaf drop in the fall enriches the soil for diverse understory plants. I feel awe looking up at these trees and thinking that there are more trees on the planet than stars in the Milky Way.
Over the centuries, much of humanity may have viewed nature with awe, but even more as a source of exploitation. Earth was seen as property, a collection of resource stocks to be bought, sold, mined and harvested for human utility. Today, that paradigm is fracturing under the weight of climate change, mass extinction and ecological collapse.
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A global movement known as the Rights of Nature, or Earth Jurisprudence, is emerging. It may sound like a radical philosophical exercise, but forests, rivers and entire ecosystems need protection of their own. The Rights of Nature movement demands that ecosystems be granted legal personhood. It asserts a revolutionary premise: Ecosystems and nonhuman species are not objects under the law but subjects with inherent rights. Forests and streams cannot speak, but neither can corporations, ships, infants, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.
It may sound far-fetched, but speaking up for trees is already happening. What began as a theoretical concept is now being codified into constitutional law, national statutes and court precedents around the world.
In 2008, Ecuador became the first nation to embed the Rights of Nature into its constitution. Article 71 grants Mother Earth the right to exist and maintain her life cycles. This constitutional mandate has been used in court to halt mining projects in biodiversity hotspots such as the Los Cedros cloud forest.
Bolivia's Law of Mother Earth enacted sweeping legislation that grants Earth specific rights, including the right to clean water, clean air, biodiversity and freedom from genetic modification.
Indigenous governance in New Zealand transformed international law in 2017 when the country's Parliament passed legislation recognizing the Whanganui River and Te Urewera forest as living legal entities. Guardians appointed jointly by the Crown and Indigenous iwi, or tribes, act as the human voice speaking on behalf of these sacred landscapes.
In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, a small town just west of Montreal, leaders adopted the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive, regenerate their vital cycles, be restored when damaged and receive protection under the law. The action by this town of 2,000 residents is not merely symbolic; it requires officials to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning.
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The Rights of Nature movement does not advocate for human exclusion from the natural world, nor does it seek to ban all resource use. Instead, it demands reciprocity and restraint. It challenges the doctrine of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, insisting that human enterprise must operate within the boundaries of ecological balance.
Trees, rivers and wildlife cannot stand at a legal podium, but they sustain all life on Earth. By expanding our legal framework to recognize their inherent right to exist, thrive and regenerate, society is learning to speak for them, ensuring that the living world is no longer treated as property to be destroyed, but as a community of life to be protected.
The concept of the Rights of Nature may sound far-fetched in our increasingly technocentric society, but for the sake of future generations, there is intrinsic value in considering it. Unplug your device, allow your senses to absorb the local ecosystem during a walk in a nearby park, and feel the awe.
Dennis McNamara is an agriculture program associate at the Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Monmouth County.
This article originally appeared on MyCentralJersey.com: Can trees and rivers have legal rights? The movement is gaining ground