Imagining Legislation for the Rights of Nature Day

A meeting to think about what regulations we can invent to protect nature

The meeting will take place by zoom on 20 February from 18h to 20h and it is necessary to register at this form.

Just as companies or associations have legal personality, and not surprisingly, for at least a decade, legal instruments have been created to endow rivers or lakes with legal personality. In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament approved the granting of legal personality to the Whanganui River, recognising a long struggle by the indigenous Maori community of the Whanganui, who consider the river to be a living entity, as it is an ancestor.

In Spain, in 2022, the Law of Legal Personality of the Mar Menor was approved, granting rights to the Mar Menor and considering this coastal lagoon as a legal person. 

These rules represent a step forward in the defence of nature, insofar as it ceases to be an object to be safeguarded or guarded and becomes a subject of law, which by its very existence contains rights and duties. 

The project Terra Commonpromoted by Concomitentes, together with the Community of Montes de Couso and with the support of the Creative Europe programme of the European Commission, has been working for the last two years on a participatory artistic process to strengthen the capacity of this community to care for a neighbouring forest that they have been managing historically for more than 2000 years.

Among the devices that have emanated from this process was the ecofeminist day Community Forestry. How much of the past is in the future, or the Ritual Feast Os Sentires do montean artistic proposal by Asunción Molinos Gordo, who invited us to be Monte, together with many of the neighbours involved. At the same time, a protocol for the replicability of this festival and the artistic-legal document Plan de Autoprotección del Monte have been generated.

In the Day of Imagination of norms for the Rights of Nature, this plan will be presented by the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo and the president of the Monte Vecinal en Mano Común of CousoXose Antón Araujo, as well as participate and Carlos Andrés Baquero Díaz, Researcher at the Land Rights Advocacy Program (ERA) at New York University School of Law. The session will be led by Natalia BalseiroTerra Común project mediator and participation expert.