“Rights of Nature”
14/5 2024
Martin Hultman
Bokbidrag: “Rights of nature” (2024)
What if water and other nature ecohabitats had rights? That is the question Martin Hultman introduce in this entry of Elgar Encyclopedia of Environmental Sociology which he compiled by invitation by the editor professor Christine Overdevest. Hultman describes how the aim of much innovative scholarship in sociology, political ecology, and environmental law during the early 2020s is to ask such questions – not in a speculative way, but in a very concrete manner, in which extractivist jurisprudence (like, for example, all mining laws across the globe) can be challenged (Nachet, Beckett, and MacNeil 2021; Raitio, Allard, and Lawrence 2020). RoN have ancient biocultural roots, from Indigenous traditions that have always treated humans as part of nature rather than distinct from it. The specific legal idea that other-than-human living systems (or “nature”) can have statutory rights within a Global North-defined legal system, asdefined in Earth jurisprudence, has emerged in recent decades through contributions from legal experts, lawyers, heads of state, philosophers, and ecological activists (Corrigan and Oksanen 2021; Grear et al. 2021; La Follette and Maser 2017). In this entry you get a short overview of the development so far and a few ideas what of what may be ahead.
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