Irene Garcia, advisor to the mayor of Curridabat, a town near San José, the capital of Costa Rica, wants to grant legal rights to bees. Not only bees, in fact, all pollinators of the plants that populate the city. Her proposed amendment is part of a growing movement that wants to give rights to nature. According to this idea, bees, rivers, and mountains should have rights just like humans. In a city, however, the boundary between what’s artificial and what’s nature becomes blurry, posing the question of which ‘nature’ in the ‘rights of nature’ should be protected.
Curridabat is one of more than 400 rights of nature initiatives in almost 40 countries around the world. Promoted mostly by local activists like Irene, the idea, developed in the 1970s and implemented since the mid-2000s, has entered national laws as well as multinational debates. In 2008, Ecuador became the first, and still only, country to enshrine the rights of nature in its constitution. “Nature ... has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes,” the constitution says. But as with more than two-thirds of all initiatives, ‘nature’ remains undefined.
While this might not seem to be a problem at first glance, on closer inspection, it becomes one. Nature is constantly changing. And for the past few centuries, humans have had a massive impact on this change. The United Nations estimates that humans have altered 77 percent of land and 87 percent of oceans. In 2020, the weight of human-made items exceeded the weight of all living beings. Add to this accelerating climate change, the looming mass extinction of species, and other planetary boundaries that are about to be crossed and it becomes clear why some want to name the contemporary geological epoch ‘the Anthropocene’ — the epoch of humans.
