The following essay is an outline of a paper on animal rights, Nature’s rights, and the law, presented by Mia MacDonald and Martin Rowe at the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) conference in March 2025. MOTH is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. The paper was written by Mia MacDonald, Martin Rowe, and Judy Nahum, Brighter Green.
For two centuries, campaigners and communities have undertaken organized efforts to improve the welfare of animals, preserve wilderness, clean up or prevent pollution, bring about ecosystem restoration, and halt species’ exploitation and extinction through laws, policies, and societal practices. They have met with mixed success. In recent decades, some animal advocates and environmental theorists and activists have adopted a new, radical approach to addressing multiplying challenges by using the language and legal status of rights to secure new protections for the nonhuman world.
Brighter Green’s project, Justice at the Intersections explores how the theories of animal rights and rights of Nature and MOTH (more than human) rights complement as well as diverge from one another. Through case studies from a variety of nations and jurisdictions, our research paper examines how rights for Nature and/or nonhuman animals have been advanced (and not) by court rulings, constitutions, legislation, and tribal and municipal governance.
The paper also describes how the philosophies underpinning animal rights and rights of Nature are reflected in, or remain distinct from, Indigenous cosmologies, and other legal and social approaches that guide human obligations toward, and ties within, the other-than-human world.
We propose four concrete issues where the rights of Nature and rights of animals clearly intersect and where the movements and advocates for each could—and should—collaborate to expand rights and secure significant protections. These are:
- industrial animal agriculture;
- industrial fishing and aquaculture;
- preventing pandemics and zoonoses, and stopping the trade in wildlife (illegal and legal); and
- ending captivity for keystone species.
The analysis and future directions we’re exploring are presented in the contexts of the accelerating climate and biodiversity crises, ongoing and new violations of the rights of human communities, lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, and scientific and ethical research that demonstrates the essential entanglement of humans with the nonhuman world.
In March 2025, Brighter Green presented a shorter version of the paper at an academic conference convened by the interdisciplinary MOTH project, which is part of New York University Law School’s TERRA (The Earth Rights Research and Action) Clinic. The full paper (about 40,000 words), will be published later in 2025. Mia MacDonald will also participate in the MOTH project’s annual global course at NYU London in July 2025.
Brighter Green is also working to include rights of animals in ongoing legal cases, scholarship, and advocacy. We’re bringing to the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature’s tribunal process is the myriad consequences of investigative reporting Brighter Green supported into the rapid expansion of mega-farms producing pigs and chickens in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula by independent journalist Patricio Eleisegui.
These include deforestation, land seizures, pollution of cenotes (the only source of water for the Peninsula’s people and wildlife), militarized crackdowns on Indigenous Mayan community protests, and confinement of hundreds of thousands of pigs and chickens animals in factory farms. A large majority of the mega-farms operate without the environmental permits Mexico’s federal government requires. In our view, the situation violates rights of nature, rights of animals (wild and domesticated), and human rights. Remedies must be taken to end agribusinesses’ current practices and its apparent impunity.
As part of our research, we have interviewed scholars and activists in numerous countries who are using theories of rights of natures and rights of animals to push the boundaries of legal protections for the non-human world in courts, municipalities, global institutions, and “soft law.” We wanted to know how they saw the intersections among rights of nature and rights of animals, and where collaboration could take place.
Pablo Solón, a judge for the global Rights of Nature tribunal and executive director of the Fundacion Solón in La Paz, said this (in part): “In the case of my country [Bolivia], [the two movements] are very much linked. There is a lot of collaboration, because everyone realizes you can’t defend animals if you can’t defend the environment. Their environment is Nature, forest, water. It’s clean air. So therefore, to only focus on animals without looking at the entire scope of Nature is almost not rational.”
Joyce Tischler, professor of practice, Lewis & Clark Law School, spoke of how the movements can support each other to advance the rights of the non-human world. “When we in the animal rights movement see rivers and mountains and streams and forests given that status of legal beings, of legal persons, the Nonhuman Rights Project puts those kinds of things into its briefs. It [becomes] part of the litigation,” she said. “We [the two movements] walk down this road together. We may not be able to go the full distance of that road, but let’s go as far as we can.”