Legal Rights for Whose Nature?

In this article, we explore rights of nature (RoN) as an emerging rights-based environmental governance that intends to reframe nature from property to an entity with a right to exist unharmed. Its proponents claim this is a paradigm shift that reworks the imbalanced human–nature hierarchy. We interrogate this claim using data collected from more than 60 U.S. communities where RoN ordinances have been implemented. Our analysis identifies three reoccurring themes within the U.S. settler colonial context, including a coconstitution of rights for nature alongside a community’s right to a healthy environment, the emphasis of self-governance and individual community empowerment, and the overwhelming Whiteness of settler communities that implement RoN laws. We put these themes into conversation with critical race scholarship, which evaluates the racialized impacts of a liberal legal system of rights to examine how within the U.S. settler colonial context RoN mobilizes Western White liberal conceptions of legal rights to address our current environmental crises. In analyzing these themes through the lens of critical race scholarship, we contend that rights-based environmental governance in the form of RoN laws appears to reinforce many of the entrenched social-legal-environmental relations that characterize White liberalism recast through a language that claims universal rights.