Beyond Conservation: Rights of Nature and the Reorientation of Environmental Law

For decades, environmental law in the United States has operated primarily within a conservation framework that regulates pollution and extraction while continuing to treat the natural world as property for human use. As climate disruption intensifies and biodiversity loss accelerates, this model is increasingly criticized as structurally incapable of preventing ecological harm at its roots. This lecture examines an emerging jurisprudential shift: the movement from protecting nature as an object of regulation to recognizing ecosystems as subjects of legal rights. Focusing on Rights of Nature as both a legal and philosophical development, the presentation will explore how this framework challenges anthropocentric assumptions embedded in conventional environmental and property law. It asks what follows when rivers, watersheds, forests, and other ecosystems are understood not merely as resources, but as living systems with interests the law should recognize and protect. The lecture will also consider how this shift reframes the relationship between human communities and the natural world, emphasizing that human health, stability, and flourishing are inseparable from the flourishing of the ecosystems on which communities depend. Alongside developments in Washington State, the talk will situate these questions within a broader global movement, tracing how jurisdictions and communities around the world are advancing new legal approaches to ecological governance. The result is not simply a new environmental doctrine, but a deeper challenge to the assumptions that have long structured modern law.