The next few posts will explore the various drivers propelling the UK Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. Essentially, why are people pursuing RoN here? And why now? The answers emerged from interviews I conducted with a range of RoN campaigners across the country, including city councillors, legal professionals, citizen scientists, educators, and academics.

Immediately apparent from the interviews was that, rather than a reactionary policy responding to a singular crisis, the RoN movement stems from a confluence of political, legal, ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural dissatisfactions. In this post, we’ll start with the political and legal drivers…

In the summer of 2023, I conducted interviews with campaigners, city councillors, and legal professionals to examine some of the motivations, methods, enablers and barriers to the UK’s nascent Rights of Nature movement.

In this blog, I’ll unpick the findings of this research and return to some of the interviews to bring them out of anonymity (with permission) and to catch up on how interviewees’ RoN initiatives are progressing (or not, as may be the case). I’ll also periodically review other research in this area, together with appearances of RoN in literature and media.

Rivers are rights-bearing beings that deserve to have a voice in our decision-making structures – and to be treated as life-sustaining ecosystems, not vessels to carry away human waste.

Recent extreme weather has brought flooding to the River Avon. Homes abandoned, pubs and businesses forced to close, trains cancelled, and roads submerged.

Image: The Bristol Cable

“People feel that they are not being heard and that in turn Nature, and in particular the river, is not being heard.”

This is the central argument presented by Lewes town mayor and district councillor Matthew Bird in a motion that sets out his vision of formally recognising the rights of his local river, the Ouse.

Three formative visits to the wilderness of the Canadian Subarctic alert Li An Phoa to the global urgency of river ecology degradation. On her first visit, she joins a canoe protest against a proposed hydroelectric project within the territory of the Indigenous Cree people. Their Rupert River is undammed, truly wild, and drinkable. As a European reader, I am transported to a fluvial world that feels as if it is on the precipice of unbeing […]