CELDF releases 1st ‘State of Rights of Nature Report’

by Max Wilbert

In 1972, a small California law journal published professor Christopher Stone’s seminal article, “Should trees have standing?” Thirty-four years later, his thought experiment became legal reality when a rural community in Pennsylvania passed the first-ever rights of nature law in the western legal system, and by doing so sparked a global movement.

Twenty years ago, on Sept. 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough Council voted to adopt the Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance which states that “residents, natural communities, and ecosystems shall be considered to be ‘persons’ for purposes of the enforcement of [their] civil rights.”

This marked the first time in the world that nature had enforceable legal rights within western law. Today, over 60 local governments and tribal nations in the U.S. and over 35 countries recognize the rights of nature in some way.

Tamaqua Borough, located in eastern Pennsylvania 75 miles from New York City, has been a sacrifice zone for over 100 years. Following decades of coal mining, the former mining pits became valuable as toxic waste disposal sites in the early 2000s. Facing corporate poisoning, local residents including Cathy Morelli organized against a proposal to deposit hundreds of truck loads of fly ash, river dredge, and sewage sludge in the Springdale Pit bordering Tamaqua.

“Our cancer clusters didn’t matter,” says Morelli, who was voted onto the Borough Council and helped push through the rights of nature ordinance. “Our clear and united voice opposing dumping didn’t matter. What mattered was that a corporation wanted to dump in Tamaqua – regardless of what we, the people, wanted. And each way we turned for help to stop it, we faced dead ends.” 

Morelli credits a nonprofit called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) with providing the legal assistance and creative thinking that sparked the landmark law. ”Learning about CELDF and community rights was a game-changer in our community,” she says. “We found the courage to stand up for ourselves. We realized that no one was going to protect us or the ecosystems upon which we depend except us.”

CELDF, once a traditional environmental law firm working to challenge permits in the regulatory system, has been a leader in the global rights of nature movement that has emerged since 2006 and spread worldwide.

In 2008 the country of Ecuador adopted a new constitution recognizing rights of nature. In a seminal legal decision against mining in Los Cedros in 2021, the Ecuadorian high court ruled that ”rights of nature propose that in order to harmonize human relationships with nature, it is the human being who must adequately adapt to natural processes and systems”.

Christopher Stone wrote in his 1972 article that ”each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’ – those who are holding rights at the time.” 

Though Stone’s law review article influenced the work of CELDF and the law in Tamaqua Borough, it is important to note that Indigenous people and cultures across the globe have lived and continue to live in the manner that reflects the values which rights of nature laws have attempted to codify in the western legal system, and there is evidence that rights of nature was recognized in a tribal law in 2002.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Tamaqua, CELDF is sharing an interview with Cathy Miorelli and CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price on our Truth and Reckoning podcast this Saturday as the two recall some of the events and impacts that led to the historic ordinance adoption in 2006. 

Rights of nature has come a long way since then, but still has a long way to go to be fully realized. In April 2025, Ben Price and other rights of nature advocates from around the world were scheduled to speak at the United Nations, but were denied by the order of the president of the UN General Assembly. CELDF reported on this in a media release from May 2025 entitled, “A Slap in the Face” — Rights of Nature Advocates Silenced at the United Nations.

To document successes, challenges, and pitfalls in rights of nature work, the organization also released the inaugural State of Rights of Nature Report in June 2026. The report, the first in what will be an annual series, highlights that “as rights of nature gains momentum around the world, it is important that advocates guard against co-optation and the pressure that powerful opponents are already putting on our movement to render it ineffective.”

To track what has happened to date with the rights of nature movement, the most comprehensive collection of rights of nature laws and judicial decisions can be found at the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor.

 Max Wilbert is author of the newsletter Biocentric, at maxwilbert.substack.com.