Rights of Nature Roundtable

It is time to transform our relationship as humans to the non-human natural world—culturally and legally. This roundtable will provide an opportunity to learn about the current move towards legal articulation of the rights of nonhuman entities and beings, broadly called “Rights of Nature” or “Rights of Ecosystems” laws and resolutions. These approaches draw and operate in collaboration with Indigenous, Native and Tribal worldviews and are consistent with what ecological, geophysical and evolutionary sciences know about the world.

Rather than positioning humans at the center, with all other biotic and abiotic beings and processes acting in service to them, these laws decenter humans and recognize our place as an embedded piece of a complex and richly dynamic world of dependence and emergence, and give legal standing in a court of law, to specific ecosystems and/or species, such as a river, or the Puget Sound, or the southern resident orca whales.

Elizabeth Dunne (Earth Law) and Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin (Shearwater Law) will provide an introduction to these alternative means of legislating, with specific attention to a draft bill recognizing rights of the Southern Resident Orca, a species for which legal “protections” have failed. Dr. Jennifer Calkins (evolutionary biologist and attorney at WELC) will discuss why this alternative is more consistent with what science tells us about the world with particular focus on the Southern Resident Orcas.

The Roundtable is November 17th, from 12-1:00 pm PT.

You can register for the Roundtable at Eventbrite with this link:

https://fanwa.org/event/rights-of-nature-for-the-southern-resident-orcas-roundtable-discussion/