The notion that natural systems could have legal rights is receiving serious attention.

‘Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new entity, the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable.’

The first principle of Bolivia’s law — here translated into English (.pdf) from the original Spanish — calls for human activities to “achieve dynamic balance with the cycles and processes inherent in Mother Earth,” with Mother Earth defined as “a unique, indivisible, self-regulating community of interrelated beings that sustains, contains and reproduces all beings.” A ministry of Mother Earth will be established, and an ombudsman appointed to hear disputes.

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1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

The concept that nature itself can possess rights runs counter to the classical liberal theories of government that hold sway throughout much of the West, which view rights as possessed only by individual human beings. But Ecuador is not the first country to propose granting rights to nonhuman entities: Many countries, including the United States, have long held that corporations possess many of the same rights – such as the rights to free expression and to due process – that human beings have.