Want to Become a Lorax? A New Course Rethinks Environmental Rights
So, you may have read The Lorax when you were growing up, and you will recall that the great declaration of that book is a Lorax standing at a stump and saying, ‘I speak for the trees,’” says visiting Law School professor James Salzman. Then, his smile fades. “Our legal system doesn’t really work that way.”
In their new course, “The Rights of Nature,” Salzman and American History and Harvard Law School professor Jill Lepore explore just that: the “Lorax problem.” Their course investigates a burgeoning American legal movement known as the Rights of Nature. Drawing on international and Indigenous laws, this emerging field argues that granting legal personhood to wildlife and natural features could help stave off environmental destruction.
For Lepore, this course is not an endorsement but an exploration. She admits that, like her students, she is “genuinely uncertain” whether the new framework could strengthen existing environmental protections and succeed in its mission to mitigate climate change.
“There’s not a single ‘Rights of Nature’ approach. It’s a bag of ideas, and some of those ideas are more promising than others,” says Lepore.
“Rather than wait around and then years later teach a course on what it was, we try to imagine what it could be,” she adds.
Though Salzman and Lepore can’t yet predict the tangibility of a Rights of Nature approach in the United States, both agree that success is subjective.
“One can look at Rights of Nature cases in the U.S. to date, and say it’s been a failure because the cases have failed in a court of law,” Salzman says. “Maybe the court of law is not actually where the action is taking place, and the court of public opinion is where the focus is.”
Due to this wide range of student perspectives — the course is offered jointly with HLS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences — a major component of the class is its end- of- year nature summit. The professors hope to challenge their students to do — and not just read.
Seated in the hallowed benches of Boston’s Old State House, students, representing the competing interests of one of a myriad of entities — from the Cape Cod seashore to pollinators to the National Association of Home Builders — will work together to write an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution.
How will they build their case?
“We say, ‘Well, trees aren’t people and forests aren’t people.’ Well, corporations aren’t people either. And we have no problem giving them rights — a lot of rights,” Salzman says.
“The idea of Rights of Nature has enormous rhetorical power,” he adds.
In contrast to canonical environmental law, the Rights of Nature framework expands what’s possible.
“Environmental law, in essence, is very much a balancing act. How much pollution do we want to allow versus economic development?” he says. “Rights are a different matter. Rights are absolute.”
It is no coincidence, Salzman argues, that Rights of Nature legal “wins” have played out in the global South and countries with large Indigenous populations, from Ecuador to New Zealand, places and people disproportionately affected by climate change.
“The nation-states with the lowest emissions have the greatest damages. One of the ideas behind Rights of Nature is that nothing else is working to stop the global North from continuing on the path,” says Lepore. “We need a new, bigger, better idea. That idea, in this case, really comes from Indigenous law.”
Lepore explains that in the U.S., organizing law and politics around rights tends to promote absolutism, the idea that the rights of different entities are destined to clash. In other countries and in Indigenous legal systems, rights are more easily shared. “We may have hit a wall with a trapped way of thinking about rights that’s leading to a lot of political tragedy,” Lepore says.
After decades stuck in “partisan gridlock,” Salzman is hopeful that the Rights of Nature framework helps turn the corner.
Students, Lepore thinks, should be asking themselves, “Is this approach better than or does it interfere with environmental laws that currently exist?”
Many students, Salzman and Lepore note, joined the class frustrated with traditional environmental law. While the course might not have all the answers, Lepore sees a silver lining.
“‘I wonder what if?’ is a different way to feel than ‘What the hell!’” she says.
— Associate Magazine Editor Ciana J. King can be reached at ciana.king@thecrimson.com