 Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the 2021 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. I'm Jenny Rushlow, Director of the Environmental Law Center and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs. We're very pleased to welcome you today, and each of these talks in the series is worth one Vermont CLE credit. So please keep track of which talks you attend for your own records. At the end of the presentation today, we will have time for Q&A, and you can just type any questions that you have in the chat and we'll get to as many as we can after the talk. Today, we're very pleased to welcome Professor David Tkach. David Tkach is a professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law. He's an accomplished scholar and focuses his scholarship on carbon offsetting biodiversity conservation law, the human right to water, and legal personhood for non-human entities. He's the author of a book called The Idea of Biodiversity published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He's been a consultant for international NGOs and U.S. government agencies analyzing legal and policy issues pertaining to red plus or the reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, as well as global climate change. We're lucky to have Professor Tkach here at VLS this summer, residentially on campus, as our 2021 Distinguished International Environmental Law Summer Scholar. Today, he'll present a talk titled Rivers with Rights. Please join me in welcoming Professor David Tkach. Thank you, Danny, and thank you everyone at Vermont Law School for hosting me. I'm now going to do the most dangerous part of the talk, which is try to share my screen, and hopefully that will work. Hopefully, you can now see my slides. Good. A recent article in Science proclaims a rights revolution for nature. In New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Bangladesh, and even the U.S., rights are being granted to non-human entities by governments, by courts, and by voter initiatives. The exact governance arrangements of these new grants of legal personhood are still being worked out, but in each case, someone will have the right, the authority and the right to speak for what a given river or mountain or lake needs or wants. But in every case, thus far, local citizens have been given increased power to control local resources vital for their survival by being given a voice to say what the environmental feature might want or need in order to flourish. So in the case of the Whanganui River in the North Island of New Zealand, the 2017 law giving the River Legal Rights declares koal te awa ko te awa ko hao, or I am the river and the river is me. So what does it mean if the law switches from we own the river to we are the river? And in this talk, I will explore through a brief journey to show you a few examples. Note that all of these are experiments in environmental law. The full implications of the transformation won't be known for years. Much of what I'm discussing here is based on interviews with the players in this movement and all the pictures except for one that I'm showing you, either my husband or I have taken. So they're all personal pictures. For a non human entity to have legal rights, someone can institute legal actions on its behalf. Injury to it must be considered and relief from injuries must flow to its benefit. For centuries and even millennia, indigenous people, indigenous groups have translated their lore into their local law, where they revere, manage and protect the non human features upon which they depend. But this lore seldom if ever gets translated into the law of Northern or Western legal systems until perhaps now. In the early 1970s, Christopher Stone wrote a famous law review article for those of you law professors that's usually an oxymoron. But in this case, it does become a famous law review article called should trees have legal standing where he poses exactly that that in the budding world of environmental law, trees and other natural features should be able to have guardians, adulate them appointed to represent their rights. This was viewed favorably in at least one Supreme Court dissent by Justice William Douglas for those of you who are students out there and get and are bored with your typical environmental law court decisions. You should all read the dissent in Sierra Club versus Morton. And Justice Douglas writes the river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life that sustains and nourishes fish, aquatic insects, water, oozles, otter, fish or deer, elk, bear and all the other animals, including man who are dependent on it for who enjoy it for its site, its sound or its life. The river is plaintive, speaks to the ecological unit of life that is part of those people have a meaningful relation to that body of water, whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist or a lager must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with. Destruction. Nonetheless, that dissent did not become the law, trees do not have legal standing in the US system. More recently in the 2000s, lawyers, philosophers, the logents have started to formulate an earth jurisprudence. Thomas Perry, who was a theologian wrote every component of the earth community both living and nonliving has three rights, the right to be the right to a habitat or place to be and the right to fulfill its role in the ever ongoing process of the earth community. Human made law does not grant rights to nature in Thomas Perry's world, rather we recognize the existing rights created when the earth formed and its evolutionary process unfurled. Trying to implement Thomas Perry's version into a book called Wild Law, South African Lawyer and Philosopher Corps, my colon and advocate that our legal systems must overcome the obsessively anthropocentric core falsehood that we humans are separate from our environment and we can flourish even as the health of the earth deteriorates. All of this is well and good, but it did took until recently for some of this philosophy, some of this earth jurisprudence to actually begin to bear fruit. So I'm going to take you first the Fanganui River in the Northern Island of New Zealand. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament passed a law granting the river full legal personhood. The legislation protects the entire river from the mountains to the sea, its tributaries and all physical and metaphysical elements as an indivisible and living whole. The legislation includes funds to redress the local Maori people for past wrongs and to support work to establish the legal framework for the new governance form. The law requires two formal appointees, one representing New Zealand government and one representing the local Maori who will speak for the inherent rights of the river. In fact, the New Zealand government appointed a Maori spokeswoman as its own appointee. So the initial appointees were both Maori. Here is the Fanganui River flowing through downtown Fanganui. Here is the office where they are formulating the governance documents that will control the Fanganui and speak for what the Fanganui actually means. There is a history to this. In 1840, the white colonists came to New Zealand and signed the Treaty of Waitangi with various different Maori tribes. Unfortunately, many of the ideas like sovereignty were unfamiliar to the Maori and so the translations were not anything that they actually understood because the concept simply didn't exist in Maori cosmology. In 1975, trying to undo centuries of colonial depredation on the Maori, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up and has adjudicated thousands of individual claims from Maori land rights, especially in recent years, much of the claims have been based upon Maori cosmology and recognizes this as a valid basis for some of these land claims. I'll take you ahead to 2008. The Conservative government of Prime Minister John Key appointed Christopher Finlayson as the Attorney General and Minister for Waitangi Treaty negotiations. And they began serious negotiations with the local Fanganui tribe, with the group, to attempt to figure out the future of the Fanganui River. Maori Chief Negotiator Gerard Albert explained to me that they didn't just want formal legal ownership because that would lead them to fall to a trap because ownership does not provide for the totality of the relationship. The stage was set. The government opposed the Maori or anyone else owning fresh water while somehow believing that rights to use the water could be bought and sold. And while the Maori don't believe in private property ownership of rivers or land, they have been forced into a position that they do believe in such. That is to say, if anyone is going to own the resources, it should be them based upon their ancestral claims. They were here first, after all, and treaty obligations. A New Zealand lawyer, Anne Solomon, has posited that the Maori must thus claim simultaneous relevance of alternative realities. Speaking modern legalese into welcome with Maori language and cosmology. Previous Maori agreements resulting in transfer of property rights amounted to what she has called ontological submission. The local Iwi, that is to say the local tribe, may gain the rights to control and use or own the resource, but at the expense of violating their deep rooted understanding of their relationship with the world around them. And undermining their own claims founded in a non-western paradigm of non-property. Solomon cites one Maori claimant at a Waitangi Tribunal hearing on fresh water saying that while his people did not believe anyone could own water and they had been comfortable with the crown managing the rivers for the good of the nation, they did not agree that the waterway should be handed over to partially privatized power companies. Thus they had little choice. According to one claimant, blame the government for us claiming ownership. So all of this resulted in 2017, Teawa Tupua or the Whanganui River Claims Settlement Act. Teawa Tupua literally means river with ancestral power and the act declares that Teawa Tupua is a legal person, has all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person. It says the river is an indivisible and living whole comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements. It is a spiritual and physical entity that supports and sustains both the life and natural resources within the Whanganui River and the health and well-being of the iwi, the tribe, the hapu, the individual clans and other communities on the river. And they have an inalienable connection with and responsibility to Teawa Tupua and its health and well-being. And it creates a somewhat Baroque governing structure, Te Pu Tupua, which will be the human face of Teawa Tupua. And their duties are to act and speak for and on behalf of Teawa Tupua and to promote and protect the health and well-being of Teawa Tupua. So it remains to be seen what happens with this there in the process of formulating their governance document, how they're actually going to speak for the river. Much of the work has been put on a hold for the last year and a half because of COVID. Three years earlier in 2014, the New Zealand government gave legal rights to the land that previously comprised Te Otawera National Park. In one management change, the Maori Board selected to speak for its interest required that rather than applying for a traditional permit, businesses wanting to operate in the area must negotiate friendship agreements that detail how they will demonstrate loyal affection to Teawa Oera values and need to continue for complex balancing act among living systems. Here are some slides from this very lush, watering mountainous land of lakes and rivers. The act itself says Te Otawera is ancient and enduring, a fortress of nature, alive with history, a place of spiritual value with its own mana and Maori. It has an identity in and of itself, inspiring people to commit to its care. And it is declared itself to be a legal entity. The mountain ecosystem has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. So the act says that the Maori Governing Board will be managing according to traditional principles to bring moral integrity to their governments such as mana, the sensitive perception of a living and spiritual force in a place. Tapu, a state or condition that requires certain respectful human contact, including raising awareness or knowledge of the spiritual qualities, requiring respect, and Papatuanuku or landscape, nature itself operating on the basis of diversity. A human view of devastation can be for Te Otawera, a process of recycling and regeneration. Nothing in nature is wasted. A process and everything happens for a reason. There is a governance document. I've put the link in the slideshow. I don't know if the slides are available. It's a fascinating document that they have produced, which names the norms by which they are going to govern Te Otawera. The document aims to disrupt the norms about the management of people for the benefit of the land, not for land management. As a preview of what might come from some of these grants of legal personhood, there's a couple of early skirmishes. For one thing, the local non-Mauri government had received a couple of million dollars to repave the highway around Te Otawera, and the Governing Board put a stop to it, saying that they did not believe that Te Otawera actually wanted oil-based asphalt. And so at the loss of a couple of million dollars to the local government. Similarly, when a flood washed out the bridge around Lake Waikamawana, which is part of the great walk around Te Otawera, the Maori Board delayed in putting back the bridge, saying that perhaps Te Otawera did not actually want the bridge where it was. So these are early flexing of power to say these acts mean what they say, and the Governing Board really is going to manage Te Otawera according to the needs of the mountain. The ultimate goal for both the Whanganui and the Tuho around Te Otawera is control of Mount Tangawero. This is Mount Tangawero. It had a supporting role in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Ring trilogy. It played the role of the Mount of Doom where Sauron had his lair and the fellowship was heading to destroy the great ring of power. The Tangawera powers scheme supplies much of the electricity to the North Island of New Zealand. It's up for relicensing in 2040. The Maori call it an act of aquatic decapitation. According to Gerard Albert, I have seen grown men cry over this site and they are attempting to gain control over that river as well through the way they govern their respective rivers and mountain ecosystems. So what's being written into this agreement is that these agreements is the primacy of the relationship between human and non-human communities, a legal recognition of the value of the complex relationship and recognition that the health of both human and non-human can only improve in synergistic symbiotic interconnection. It's about who gets to speak for the river and thus whose paradigm of human-non-human relations is deemed legitimate culturally and legally and thus controlling. Legal personhood for the Whanganui or Te Otawera is simply the latest perhaps most important chapter in the Maori's quest for self-determination. Here the ability of a people to determine the relationships of the non-human world around them. It remains to be seen how these new legal forms will or will not transform the non-human entities and the human communities that share the planet with them. Much more right on the institutions and people in charge of those institutions that emerge to speak for the needs of the river and the mountain. The legal outcomes are replicable anywhere citizens are looking to legalize a complicated ecologically grounded recognition that we are fundamentally interconnected with the natural world, that we are the natural world and it is us. The underlying beliefs may have deep historical roots as in Maori New Zealand or they may be thoroughly modern inventions prompted by the cataclysms portended by ecological scientists or by ecological degradation. We view through our own eyes in our own neighborhoods. Seeing ourselves as part of not apart from non-human nature means we see that we injure ourselves with each species loss or chemical catastrophe. By reorienting how we understand our interrelationship with the natural world and writing that reorientation into law we ward against injuring the natural world and thus ourselves. So let's go now to Australia and the Yarra River. The government of Victoria Australia has created a governing council including indigenous representatives that will speak for the Yarra River's interest in planning and illegal disputes. This is the Yarra River through downtown Melbourne. It's the source of water from much of the state of Victoria. It is rich in wildlife. Here's a colony of fruit bats in the city along the river. Unfortunately Melbourne is also a boomtown massive sprawling construction. Victoria is the most deforested state in Australia and so comes a 50 year planning effort to figure out what to do for the next 50 years with the Yarra River. The Yarra River Protection Act was passed in 2017 recognizing the Yarra as one living natural entity. The act begins. It's the first act in Australia that is written in both English and in aboriginal text, part of which reads the beer rum or the Yarra is alive has a heart spirit and is part of our dreaming. We have lived with and known the beer rum since the beginning. We will always know the beer rum since our beginning it has been known that we have the obligation to keep the beer run alive and healthy for all generations to come. And it names an 11 person council which is called which will be the voice of the river. This council is comprised of a couple of aboriginal representations but also scientists, farmers, planners. So a representative of Victoria state culture. So this is a model that if that can be used anywhere of bringing together various different community elements including indigenous people to speak for what a river might actually need. Again here they were just about to jump into their work to figure out what their interventions were going to be. When COVID hit and so they've been put on hold for about a year and a half now. In the northwest of Australia, indigenous activists and other local citizens are similarly trying to designate well the Margaret River in the southwest, the Great Barrier Reef and the Fitzroy River in the northwest to act as guardians at Lightham for the various different ecological features. This is the Fitzroy River. It is in the dry season it dries up to almost nothing with various different stranded bill of bombs but in the wet season. It's often many years it is the most voluminous river the biggest river in the world. And their local 19 activists have put together the Fitzroy River declaration, the traditional owners of the river declaring the Fitzroy River is a living ancestral being with a right to life. Dr. Ann Polina, who is both a Naya Keena elder and environmental lawyer explained to me that they are using the examples of rivers with rights in other locations to try to convince both the northwest territory government as well as the national government to declare the river as a legal person and to see to control over the river's future to the local Aboriginal communities. In one recent article in Transnational Environmental Law, the Martawara is listed as the primary as the first author of the article. And in this article, the both Ann Polina and various different other Australians, including the river itself, argue for legal recognition of the colonial state laws of the Martawara as a living ancestral being by close analogy with the case concerning the Funganui River. One last stop into the northwest part of Columbia, the Colombian Constitutional Court has ordered government entities to recognize the rights of the Rio of Toronto, including developing the plan to reverse degradation of the river. Similar to the New Zealand president, the court required appointment of one government and one community delegate to represent the rights of the river. And the Colombian, since that there have been several other cases where various different entities in Columbia have been granted legal rights. Here is the Colombian Amazon, which has also been granted legal personhood. Columbia does share the Amazon with other nations, including Peru. It's also quite a very populated region. So what happens to the Colombian Amazon when it is declared legal person remains to be seen. It's not as simple as turning things over to local indigenous people who have unfortunately undercut much of the ecosystem there. This is a rehabilitation center for orphan primates. Much of the local fauna has been exterminated, but it remains to be seen what happens here. So in 2016, the Columbia Constitutional Court says that the Rio of Toronto's basin and tributaries are recognized as an entity subject to the rights of protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration by the state and the local Afro Caribbean communities. If there is a wonderful translation of the decision done by Weidner University Law School Delaware, and I urge everyone to read it is perhaps the most extensive analysis any court anywhere has ever done of the essential links between nature and culture, or the interdependence between human communities and the non human communities that sustain them. I mean, Columbia again this didn't just come from nowhere. Columbia constitutional provisions are based upon what they call the social rule of law, fundamentally based in human rights and human dignity, and in various different both constant both laws and judicial there's been what's called an ecological constitution emerge that is to say the ecological principles and rights that underlie the social rule of law with the recognition that you can't have human dignity without functioning ecosystems. The decision also discusses extensively bio culturally bio cultural rights that even intrinsic connection that exists between nature resources and the culture of the ethnic and indigenous communities that had have them, which are interdependent with each other and cannot be understood in isolation. This is the most thorough going eco centric decision granting rights to non human entities, the basic premise, according to which the land does not belong to man and on the contrary assumes that man is part of the earth like any other species. According to this interpretation, the human species is just one more event in a long evolutionary train that has lasted for billions of years, and therefore it's not in any way the owner of other species biodiversity or resources, or the fate of the planet. The law, the decision criticizes the utilitarian approach to managing ecological resources. And as opposed to recognizing that this is a living entity composed of other multiple forms of life and cultural representations that should be the subject of rights. The decision declares that the real a trial. It's based in attributaries are recognizes an entity subject to rights of protection conservation maintenance and restoration by the state and ethnic communities. Consequently, the court will order the national government to exercise legal guardianship and representation of the rights of the river. When I asked Justice Palacio, who is the Chief Justice, where he derived the idea of legal personhood for the real a trial. He said, let me tell you, I did not take this from Aladdin's life. He said that while granting a river legal personhood was a new concept for Columbia, it was not elsewhere in the world. He was very much influenced by the Fanganui decision by the terror where decision and was struck by an Indian judges opinion referring to our brothers the trees and our sisters the flowers. The judge singles out the influence of eco-centric philosophy where human beings are one more species the planet just like fauna flora and other species. Justice and his colleagues noticed that the progressive logging of trees and environmental damage continued in 50 years the zone, which is perhaps the second most biodiverse on the planet will be a desert. And this in bold strokes is the message and the philosophy of the judgment. And with this decision, the Justice's interest is to send the message to preserve life, not just the life of human beings, rather life on all of planet Earth. Court in Bangladesh, India, Ecuador have also recognized rivers legal rights with concomitant orders to governments to fulfill those rights by remediating and preventing pollution. In the US, March, 2019, citizens in Toledo, Ohio voted to give Lake Erie legal personhood, connoting the lakes right to exist flourish and naturally evolve with a full charter that lays out the rights thus granted to the lake. Similar rights of nature initiatives have been passed in various municipalities in the US. The Lake Erie initiative was immediately struck down by courts and very little meaningful legal outcomes have resulted from the other rights of nature initiatives in the US. We will see what, if anything, the future brings. So, where does this leave us? Our current legal systems usually start by asking, what do we need? And then we slot in some provisions for the planet when not too inconvenient or too expensive. The initiatives that I'm describing here reach for a system of law where we ask first and foremost, what does the planet need? And therefore, ineluctably, what do we need? That is to say, if we think hard about what a river or mountain needs and govern accordingly, in the long run, we're really thinking more deeply about what we actually need. By sustaining ecosystems and non-economic communities, we sustain human communities as well. Many of these initiatives, empowering indigenous groups or other communities with long histories as stewards who possess traditional ecological knowledge. The initiatives here that grant cultural and thus management primacy to indigenous and our local communities make compelling cases that these communities' worldviews and histories earn them the authority to speak for and thus manage the rivers and mountains that sustain them. For example, in both the New Zealand cases, local councils of Maori citizens are legally empowered to speak for what the river and mountain need. It's thought that they will manage nature as if their lives depended on it because their lives do, in fact, depend upon it. These legal innovations require that we root our laws in the fundamental interdependence between human and non-human communities. When rivers gain legal personhood, that simply means their interests matter rather than only our interests in them matter. Even the most ardent anthropocentrists cannot pursue their own interests if the river or mountain or lake or reef do not have their interests considered because these entities are the matrices that sustain human lives. These initiatives are about relationships between human and non-human, recognizing first that the relationship exists and then recognizing that we are fundamentally dependent on the continued health and flourishing of the non-human world. Law is just catching up to this inexorable fact. Finally, our ideas about the non-human world themselves are ecological actors shaping our ethics and therefore our behaviors toward the non-human world. Legal solutions that reflect and reinforce an expanded circle of moral concern tilt the balance more towards stewardship and restoration overuse and degradation. For a sustainable or any human future, I believe we need a fundamental shift in how we view the natural world and our relationships with it. We could achieve ecosystem resilience without granting legal personhood to a given non-human entity. We just haven't. Hardly ever and hardly anywhere. Thinking about granting legal rights to rivers or other ecosystem elements could play a role going forward for how to sustain human and non-human ecosystems in the future in any jurisdiction where we have changed the paradigm from we own the river to we are the river. This is based upon a paper in the Illinois Law Review, which you can find on my SSRN page. I can also send it to you if you write me at UC Hastings and I am happy to take questions if I can figure out how to do that. Okay, great. Thank you so much for that wonderful top professor, Takash. So for our listeners, we have a few minutes to ask some questions. As a reminder, if you are watching on our website live stream, please click on the icon at the bottom of the video to bring up the chat box where you can log in to add your question. And if you're watching on our Facebook live stream, add your question to the comment box below when we'll try to get through as many questions as possible. Okay. So, first of all, professor, you talked about how the Act in Australia was the first Act that was written in two languages. Is that something that's continued to be a practice in Australia or was it really just related to that subject matter? Have you seen that elsewhere? I believe that you want to double check me on this, but I do believe it's the only one less part. The whole Act was not written in local Aboriginal language and English, but portions of the Act, like the portion that I cited where I don't believe that has happened elsewhere, but you want to double check me on that one before you quote me on that. Great. Thank you. Interesting and especially interesting that they just did it in portions of the law. You talked a lot about the kind of sociological concepts here and the idea that by treating natural resources as a peer almost that we treat them better, it seems. Are there examples of any negative environmental outcomes of this kind of, you said it's not really management, but of this sort of management? Well, part of the problem is that we don't really know yet. So for example, in New Zealand, one of the fears in 2014, initially some environmental groups did not support the granting of Teora Guerra as a legal person because it had been a national park protected in some ways by the federal government and has been decommissioned as a national park and turned over to a local Maori Governing Board. Part of what the Maori will allow is hunting and fishing, for example, in places where it otherwise had not been allowed. So there was certain fears and there are still certain fears that if you turn things over where there had been some kind of legal, formal legal protections that those legal, those formal legal protections could be undermined and there could be actually more use or degradation. That remains to be seen, but the underlying philosophy that the local communities know best what they and the mountain or river or lake in interconnection actually need. We will see what actually happens in the long run, but certainly there are those people that fear what the questioner asked. The tribal approach to managing the overseeing, interacting with these natural resources, is that something that's considered to be an individual responsibility or is that something that's overseeing from a governing body or some sort of communal decision making in the same way that we think about regulation? I'm not sure I understand the question, but let me try answering it and we can follow up. So in each of the grants thus far, each of the grants of legal personhood has been associated with the formulation of some particular governing body, usually combined with local citizens and government officials, although in the Yarra River case what's important is that there is specifically no government officials on the Bureau of Council, it is only citizens. In Colombia, in Bangladesh, in New Zealand, the governing councils that are set up are to be councils, not individuals. There will be representatives appointed by the government, appointed by local communities that will be negotiating on what the river or mountain actually needs, with some kind of governing document that they either have formulated or are formulating that sets us, that creates a set of principles by which they will govern. So I'm not sure, Jenny, if I answered that question. I think we'll assume so and look for follow up if we're asked. Okay, so next question. Are you seeing any signs from the Biden administration to not only undo harmful environmental litigation from the Trump administration, but to move toward a more collaborative relationship with Indigenous leaders with environmental management? Certainly the first seven and a half months of the Biden administration has, they've been really quite aggressive in trying to undo some of the worst environmental decisions with respect to biodiversity, with respect to resources, with respect to public lands, with respect to pollutants, with respect to greenhouse gases that came during the four years of the Trump administration. Certainly there have been overtures to the tribes. Certainly I'm sure many listeners know that Deb Haland, who is now Secretary of Interior, is the first Native American to be appointed to a cabinet position ever. And one of the first initiatives that environmentalists and tribal leaders are looking at is undoing that the President Obama had set up bears, bears in Utah as a national monument, which is a site of sacred lands to many Indian tribes, has many sacred sites. President Trump carved away about 90% of that, and the Biden administration is studying returning those protections. How much actually, how far these efforts actually go to co-management to devolving responsibility to local tribal leaders we don't know yet, but certainly at least undoing some of the legacy of the Trump administration with respect to environmental resources, including resources that are of value or great spiritual or cultural or ecological value to local Indian tribes, we're seeing a lot of that. But stay tuned. Great, thank you. We're getting some really nice comments, including from someone who said you make me excited to pursue environmental law in the near future. So we'll take their question next. What are your thoughts on ecocide and should it go hand in hand with rights of nature? So I'm assuming that the questioner is asking about the concept that the International Criminal Court, based in the Hague, parenthetically that we in the United States don't recognize their jurisdiction, but that's a different discussion. They are considering adding ecocide, some formal definition of ecocide to the definition of crimes against humanity that the International Criminal Court would be able to pursue and prosecute. So up until now, when we're talking about crimes against humanity, when we're talking about crimes that cannot be committed by anyone anywhere, environmental crimes have not fallen under that category nearly ever. So the International Criminal Court and various different legal scholars are exploring what would comprise ecocide or gross grave ecological destruction that results in loss of human life as well as non-human life being added to somehow formally to the list of crimes that would be considered crimes against humanity that cannot be committed by anyone. So I think that the criminal court under universal jurisdiction could pursue prosecuting should it occur. But it's not formal yet and it hasn't been concluded yet. And there's still, as far as I know, no place where under universal jurisdiction laws crimes against human, crimes against nature, ecocide has been prosecuted successfully as a universal derogatory norm against which we can never, we can never violate that norm. That was a long winded answer to the question, which I hope I answered. Yeah, super interesting. Okay, a question from our own Pat Parento. How would a river be liable and for what? That's the dangerous word in some of these grants. In the Indian case, courts in India have granted, for example, legal rights to the Ganges, legal rights to glaciers, for example, and the fear in India and the way that the actual original court cases were overturned was based upon the fear of liability. Like what happens if the Ganges floods? Do you sue the Ganges? So it is not clear to me what a liability would mean or why other than just parroting language for when we have legal rights or when we have human rights. Those rights often come with responsibilities and you can also be liable for your actions. So it seems like much of this language is parroting that language, even though I don't understand how the Fanganui River or the Rio Atratto, for example, would ever be liable for damage that it causes. So that remains to be seen. And that actually is, at least in India, has been a shortcoming, the fear of liability and then what does the court do with it? So I don't have the answer to that, Pat. But if you do, Pat, I'd love to hear. And another question from Pat. How would a conflict between damming a river to produce carbon-free hydropower and leaving the river alone be resolved? That would depend upon what the local governing council, whether it's the Afro-Caribbean community of the Chaco in Colombia or the Baran Council on the Yarra River in Victoria or the Fanganui River, the governing organization that's governing the Fanganui River. That would depend on what they decided the river actually needed. At least it's very clear from the Maori, both in Teoreira, the National Park, and from the Fanganui River that they do the damming of the river as the ultimate offense to the river, and the ultimate offense to the relationship between the river and their communities and to the river itself. So at least in New Zealand, they have made their position very clear that hydropower is not an acceptable use of the river. That's an act of aquatic decapitation, and that if you're looking to generate carbon-free or low-carbon energy, that's not the way to do it, because that would not be the last thing that the river would ever actually want. Okay. Next question. In civil codes, rights are enumerated and expressly stated. Here in the US, we've got the Bill of Rights, and others recognized by the courts. Is it possible to list out a natural entity's rights? At what point is a line drawn and a river is not deemed worthy of rights of citizenship, speech, suffrage, representation in Congress, etc.? That's a complicated question. We don't know the answer to that, but you will find, and you can investigate on the web, there are various different attempts to do exactly what the questioner has asked. For example, when the voters in Toledo voted to give an eerie legal personhood, there was a charter of rights. There's a draft charter of rights for the Great Barrier Reef. So there are attempts to do exactly what the questioner is asking. That is to enumerate, just saying this is a legal person with legal rights, what those rights would actually comprise in a given situation. In the particular Rio Trato, Yara River, Fitzroy River, Whanganui River, in these particular examples, they don't have the rights enumerated yet in formal documents. They're all working on what those would look like. So there's some hypothetical charters, and then you've got the real branch of legal personhood where the rights are not yet enumerated. Even in New Zealand, where the governing boards of those two entities have made some progress. What they've done is their first steps have been to name the norms or the values that are going to guide their governance, but they haven't named the rights explicitly. So there hasn't yet been a connection between a hypothetical charter or bill of rights for a particular non-human entity and the granting of an actual right to that non-human entity. Again, this is work that will be coming in the coming years, and then we have to stay tuned to see. Next question. Do you think a version of the New Zealand model of joint stewardship between federal state government and indigenous people could be adapted or replicated in the US? Absolutely. One of the things I like about the Yara River example in the state of Victoria is that it's a model that you can replicate anywhere. It's a model that Justice Douglas, Christopher Stone or Justice Douglas were contemplating in the 1970s. You can always put together some group, some board, some governing entity of whomever you deem appropriate, federal officials, state officials, tribal officials, environmentalists, loggers, ranchers, whatever, to speak for what a natural entity might need. The Yara River example is really interesting because the Bureau of Council has been set up in the context of thinking about a 50-year plan for the actual river. It's not just hypothetical. It's they are now assigned by the government to say, this is what the river is going to need. That doesn't mean the river's rights are paramount as they would be in Colombia or in New Zealand. It does say, though, that the river needs to be heard. Someone needs to speak for the river, that its rights have to be asserted against cities' rights, the farmers' rights, the kangaroos' rights, the fruit bats' rights, the loggers' rights. And so that kind of co-governance model could be set up and you don't actually need to declare rights for the entity itself to make that happen. It happens that in these particular cases, we've taken that governance model and tied it to first putting the primacy of the natural entity's needs first. So, yes, it could happen. I would love to see it happen more often. What do you predict will happen next in this movement for rights of nature? What is the next phase in this movement, do you think? Well, first of all, I want to emphasize that it does, like one thing that I have covered, there are dozens of these initiatives. You know, I'm on various different lists, so if you start paying attention and you read like The Guardian every day, you will see that citizens all over the world are attempting to establish rights for nature for their local cherished environmental amenity or environmental feature. That is to say, various different citizens or NGOs are seeing this as an effective way to draw attention to and to reorient our thinking towards our relationship with the natural world. So, one thing that's happening is that this seems to be a rolling stone that's gathering a bunch of momentum. The next phase that I'm looking forward to, in which I wish I could talk to you about, but if COVID hadn't happened, we might be much further along in this, is seeing what the actual outcomes actually are. So, it's all very nice to say that the Rio Otrato has rights, and I'm going to set up a governing board of the Feringonui River has rights, but what does this actually mean? How do these governing boards speak for the mountain or the river or the lake or the reef? What happens when the rubber hits the road and there actually are debates and the governing board steps and says, no, this legislation is serious. It means what it says. So, when I talked to Gerard Albert, who is the chief negotiator for the Maori in the Fonganui River settlement, he said, look, they're trying to keep things out of the court, but at the same time they're trying to flex their muscles. And in very local disagreements, they're trying to be very cooperative, but anytime that there's some kind of development around the Fonganui, they're stepping up and saying, you can't just build that bridge over this river. In Teira Rourou, you can't just pave with oil-based asphalt. You can't just replace this pedestrian bridge that a flood washed out. You have to come to us first to see if we think that's what the river actually needs or that's what the mountain actually needs. So, the really exciting things in the 2020s, I think, is going to be twofold. One, seeing how far this actually goes and then what tangibly in the real world actually happens once those who have been assigned to speak for these non-human entities with rights actually starts to speak and there actually starts to be conflicts. Are there going to be conflicts? Is there going to be cooperation? You know, in New Zealand over 80% of citizens are very enthusiastic about the devolution of rights to non-human. What will happen in 2040 when the Teira Rourou river scheme is up for reauthorization and somehow the Teira Rourou has been turned over to local governing boards and the local governing board says, you know what, we're going to take down this hydroelectric dam now and there goes your source of electricity for the North Island. So it's all very nice to support things like that until it actually affects your life negatively. So in the 2020s, we're going to start to see what does it mean when the governing board starts to assert their power to speak for the non-human world? Do you think the U.S. would ever advocate alongside native Hawaiian Samoans and Chamaros, and apologies if I pronounced that incorrectly, to grant the ocean rights as a way to protect the U.S. interest in Hawaii, American Samoa or Guam? You know, the U.S. always stands alone and it's hard for me to visualize that future. And here's why it's difficult for me to visualize that future. The United States doesn't even speak the language of traditional human rights. If you've studied international human rights law, you know that there are 10 different international human rights law treaties. There are treaty bodies. There are treaty courts. We almost are signatories on almost none of those. We don't recognize the jurisdiction of many of those courts. The language of human rights in an international context seldom figures informal dialogue in the United States. We are outlaws in the international human rights regime. Therefore, it's difficult for me to make the conceptual leap from our refusal to participate in most formal human rights adjudications, deliberative bodies, treaties to this next step of granting human rights to non-human nature and then enforcing those rights, even when it supports our particular interest. Like I'm assuming that this big questioner is asking about, you know, within United States territory. Can you just see us choosing that legal mechanism because we haven't chosen to participate in even more traditional human rights mechanisms over the last couple of decades? So we'll see. We'll see. Probably last question that we have time for. What's the relationship between the rights of nature movement and the animal rights movement? Great question. So one of the things that's happened over the course of the last couple of millennia is that the circle of whom we have rights, whose interest do we have to consider when we act in the world has gradually expanded. There's an ever-expanding circle from thousands of years ago when, you know, white male, straight property owners were the only people that have rights. And various, we've expanded that circle in thinking about whom do we owe obligations to respect their dignity, their sanctity, their lives. That's an exciting development. One of the things and here's my opinion, every time we expand that circle to have to think about anything outside of simply anthropocentric needs, anything other than what I actually need, that actually is a step in the right direction towards greater peace, greater dignity, greater ecological sanctity in the world. So when we talk about animal rights, we are usually talking about having to respect and attend to the needs and dignity of non-human individual animals who either are of great value to us, our pets, or have properties like sentience or great intelligence or the capacity to experience emotion, like great apes or whales. This is still somehow anthropocentric. It still is placing value on these creatures because they're just like us, or they matter to us in a very personal way, either because there are property dons, horses, et cetera, or because they have features that are just like us. Chimps and gorillas are sentient and intelligent, just like us. Whales have emotions just like us and communicate just like us. An exciting expansion of our responsibilities in the world, our responsibilities to the non-human world, but still somehow based in anthropocentric thinking. To me, when we're talking about lights for rivers or mountains, we're talking about something, a real paradigm shift. This is not strictly anthropocentric thinking. This is thinking very, it's kind of an eco-anthropocentric thinking, even in cases where we're developing responsibility to a local group as part of making reparations to them or as part of respecting their knowledge as equal to our superior. To ours, about what the entity might need. It's still basing our thinking in granting rights to something that isn't just like us, that doesn't have sentience, that isn't, although we could debate that part. So to me, this is an exciting jump from the really exciting move towards granting either our pets or our farm animals as having some kind of rights to not be abused and be taken care of, or to granting rights to things like great apes or whales because they have traits just like us. Those are exciting developments. This is a paradigm shift in the next direction. This is a big leap even further to me in expanding human consciousness and responsibility. So that's my answer now. Thank you. Thank you for brushing aside animal rights for not doing a sufficient job in discussing the connection between animal rights and rights for interest. So thanks for asking a question. Yeah, we'll have to send them the link to this talk and then they'll know. Alright, thank you. That was a really fantastic talk and we were so grateful to benefit from your your research. We're out of time and so we'll need to wrap up so folks have a couple minutes to get to class at one. But thanks again David for your presentation and thank you to our listeners for those really interesting and thoughtful questions. Our next hot topics talk will be here on July 22nd on Thursday at noon Eastern time and we hope you can join us. Thank you.