Progressives have found a new client to represent in court: rivers.
In the latest absurd chapter of left-wing legal activism, environmentalists are now arguing that rivers, forests, and even entire ecosystems should be granted legal personhood and the ability to sue in court. Not metaphorically—literally.
It’s called the “rights of nature” movement, and it’s gaining traction in courts, the mainstream press, and even some national governments around the world.
Earlier this year, for instance, a court in Ecuador granted the country’s “marine ecosystems” the right to “maintain their natural life cycles, structure, functions, and evolutionary processes.” In the U.S., nearly three dozen cities and counties have passed ordinances to protect the so-called “rights of nature.”
But the movement has really gained popularity in connection to a left-wing pastime even more popular than fringe environmental nonsense: waging legal warfare against President Donald Trump. After Trump’s pro-growth, pro-energy platform won the day at the ballot box last year, progressive activists are turning to the rights of nature movement as a way to wage legal warfare on his agenda.
A recent New York Times opinion piece titled “Trump’s War on Nature Is Up Against a Powerful New Resistance Movement” clearly lays out this strategy. As Robert Macfarlane, the author of Is a River Alive? explains, the United States is supposedly in a period of “deep ecological gloom” due to the Trump administration’s “doctrine of human supremacy.”
As a solution, Macfarlane holds up the case of the Whanganui River in New Zealand as a model for how the U.S. might reimagine environmental law. The New Zealand Parliament has formally recognized the Whanganui River as a “spiritual and physical entity,” and a group of appointed guardians now speak for the river and are tasked with protecting its “mauri,” or life force.
In other words, a group of activist lawyers are now claiming to speak on behalf of a river—deciding what it wants, what it needs, and how the rest of us should live around it.
Another recent article from Rolling Stone tells us that the Trump administration is “pushing the climate crisis to a breaking point” and that the rights of nature movement can “save” us. That piece details a bill currently before the New York State Assembly which could grant legal rights to Lake Huron.
As crazy as it all sounds, this legal stunt is now gaining popularity, and activists are attempting to rewrite laws by using nature as a puppet and leftist ideology as the puppeteer.
In one of the first “rights of nature” cases filed in the United States, the city of Seattle settled a lawsuit in 2023 where a species of salmon was the plaintiff. The city agreed to create a fish passage program for salmon to migrate past several Skagit River hydroelectric dams that feed power to the city. Upon settling, Mari Margil, the director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights which assisted with the lawsuit, said, “We hope that this is the first of many rights of nature cases that result in real, practical steps toward protecting the rights of ecosystems and species… [this lawsuit] sets a framework for other campaigns to follow.”
Translation: they want to bulldoze centuries of Western legal tradition and property rights to give rocks and rivers standing in court – while they collect the attorney’s fees, of course.
But as is always the case with the “climate change” brigade, none of this is actually about the environment. It’s about power and control.
As one eco-activist admitted in an op-ed for The Observatory earlier this month, the rights of nature movement is intended to change cultural perceptions “to view human beings and natural entities as equal.” That’s not just a legal tweak – it’s an inversion of the notion that Mankind has a responsibility to act as a good steward of nature while also maintaining the right to use nature at our discretion.
Proponents of the rights of nature movement argue that corporations, under U.S. and British law, are nonhuman entities with a wide suite of legal rights. So, why not a river?
But that strawman argument doesn’t stand up to even the slightest breeze. Corporations are collections of people organized for a purpose, not inanimate objects. Granting legal standing to a river—an unthinking, unfeeling body of water—is a completely different matter.
In his Times article, Macfarlaneasserts that “the river has a right to flow, to be clean, and to be healthy.” But who defines “healthy”? Who decides what a river “wants”? Unsurprisingly, it’s activist lawyers and progressive judges. These are hardly neutral parties.
The rights of nature movement is not about conservation. It’s about giving unelected activists and ideological nonprofits the power to sue on behalf of “nature” anytime a farmer builds a dam, a rancher lays a pipe, or a developer breaks ground.
Moreover, it is impossible to ignore that many of the same people pushing legal rights for rivers are the loudest defenders of abortion without limits. In the mind of a modern progressive, a salmon has more legal protections than a child in the womb. A 38-week-old unborn baby should be killed without a second thought, but a muddy streambed now demands constitutional recognition.
If a “right to flow” for a river can be imagined into existence, what about the right to life for a baby with 10 fingers and toes and a heartbeat? If nature has standing, why doesn’t a fetus with thoughts and dreams?
These contradictions are the core of the modern left’s worldview. They invent rights for political gain while denying the most basic right to those who cannot speak for themselves. The “rights of nature” movement exposes that their only priority is power.
It also creates a legal disaster. If rivers and forests are people under the law, then any group can claim to represent them in court. Development projects could be shut down by lawsuits filed in the name of dirt.
Americans support clean water and responsible land use. They want strong environmental stewardship. But they don’t want a legal system hijacked by activists who believe moss has legal personhood and babies don’t.
The legacy media may treat this as progress. But most Americans see it for what it is: a dangerous and profoundly unserious abuse of the law.
W.J. Lee has served in the White House, NASA, on multiple political campaigns, and in nearly all levels of government. In his free time, he enjoys the “three R’s” – reading, running, and writing.
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