Sued by a River: The Bizarre History of Environmental Personhood in the Courtroom

Last August, the Komi Memem River, a tributary in the Amazon rainforest, was granted legal personhood. The rationale for the decision stemmed from environmental issues threatening the health of the river, such as agricultural pollution and industrial expansion. Francisco Oro Waram, the councilman who led the effort, emphasized the importance of the decision to AP News: “There are many generations to come, so the elders protect the water.” From now on, the river has effectively similar legal rights to humans in the courtroom, and could even potentially “sue” corporations that infringe on its health.

This bizarre concept of environmental personhood is not by any means new to the legal scene. The concept was most famously proposed half a century ago during the Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton. The case involved the Walt Disney Enterprises requesting to build property on lands owned by the Sierra Club, and although the court ruled against the Club, Justice William O. Douglas famously wrote a dissenting opinion that put forth the idea of environmental personhood. In the dissent, he observed that “inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation,” offering observations that a “ship” has “a legal personality” and that an “ordinary corporation is a ‘person’ for purposes of the adjudicatory processes.” Douglas imagined a world in which natural objects, like a river, could act as legal representatives of nature: “the river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.”

After reading the case, legal scholar Christopher D. Stone pushed this rather humorous idea towards legitimacy. In his 1972 article in the Southern California Law Review titled “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Stone argued that nature should be represented in court with a meticulous breakdown of what it means to be a holder of legal rights. Stone constructs his argument with relative nuance, fully recognizing the seeming absurdity of the proposal but also asserting that many extensions of legal rights historically have been considered “absurd.” Stone observed that “as strange as such a notion may sound, it is neither fanciful nor devoid of operational content.”

Stone’s article kickstarted an environmental movement to use environmental personhood as a legal tool for environmental activism. Along with the recent example of the Komi Memem River this year, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was given legal personhood in 2017, and Ohio passed a “Lake Erie Bill of Rights” in 2019 that delineated protections the river had as an entity against corporations, human degradation, and pollution.

This is not to say that every environmental case has been accepted. In the case Colorado River Ecosystem v. State of Colorado, environmental activists attempted to grant legal personhood to the Colorado River, to no avail. Senator Steve Daines from Montana was quick to criticize what he saw was the absurdity of the suit attempt: “Radical obstructionists who contort common sense with this sort of nonsense undercut credible conservationists.”

This criticism echoes many opponents of the environmental personhood movement, and is the reason that there is not yet concrete legal precedent in the United States for the rights of natural objects. There are also not many instances of environmental personhood yet in the courtroom, so it’s difficult to gauge whether or not there is a significant difference between someone suing on the basis of property damage and a natural object representing itself in court. As legal professor Martyna Laszewska-Hellriegel observes, environmental personhood necessarily requires much explanation and stipulation to dispel people’s immediate incredulity. Despite this understandable skepticism, it’s difficult to ignore the noble efforts of activists pushing the envelope and making inroads around the world in environmental law. New ideas like these innovate the law and challenge us to reconsider our own perceptions of what is possible. As Francisco Oro Waram puts it on the banks of the Komi Memem River, “We can’t fight with arrows; we have to use the laws.”