Is “rights of nature” the right phrase?

The Rappahannock Tribe is challenging a Virginia water permit with an argument most state courts are not built to hear: The river where the water is sourced has rights.

The permit allows Caroline County – a region between Fredericksburg and Richmond that has recently seen big investments by hyperscale data center developers – to withdraw up to 9 million gallons a day from the Rappahannock River for industrial use. To the tribe, the river is not just a water source but an ancient, life-giving relative they are duty-bound to protect – a “mother” in some members’ words.

The case is about more than water allocation. The tribe is drawing on a growing body of legal claims rooted in Indigenous law and practice to argue that the river is a living system with rights of its own. It is habitat for herring and oysters, sensitive indicator species whose decline signals a deeper injury to the river system. Withdrawing excess water threatens fragile progress restoring the ecosystem – and the tribe’s wellbeing.

“The river is an essential life giver. It’s vital to the people of the Rappahannock, and the life it supports is vital to the Rappahannock River itself,” said Frank Bibeau, a tribal attorney and enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe who has advised the plaintiffs. “Their integral, inextricable connection to the river is what keeps them alive, and what’s going to allow them to defend the river.”

In 2024, the tribe ratified a constitution recognizing the river’s rights to “exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve.” This language reflects the view of the river as a living relation in an order where humans are not owners standing above the natural world but late arrivals with duties of care and protection.

Because the tribe is federally recognized, this framework creates a path for the dispute to be heard first in tribal court.

The forum matters. Tribal court allows the initial record to be built under tribal law, in a legal system less likely to treat the river only as a resource to be divided, developed, or extracted from. Any challenge to tribal jurisdiction could still move into federal court. But by then, the case would already have been framed on the tribe’s terms.

The Rappahannock Tribe’s strategy is part of a broader rights-of-nature movement, which is a modern legal translation of older Indigenous legal and ethical traditions: reciprocity, kinship, and responsibility to land, water, animals, and other beings. Ecuador recognized the rights of nature in its 2008 constitution. New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as a legal person in 2017. In the United States, tribes and local governments have experimented with similar language to protect rivers, wild rice, salmon, and other living systems.

But the language remains unsettled.

“Rights of nature can mean many different things to different people,” said James Salzman, an environmental law scholar at UCLA and frequent visiting professor at Harvard Law. He offered a three-part framework: rights of nature as a legal strategy, meaning lawsuits brought on nature’s behalf; rights of nature as governance, giving nature a seat at the table; and rights of nature as rhetoric, a way to organize people and shift public imagination.

That last use may be the most powerful, Salzman said, but also the most politically delicate. Some participants said the phrase can inspire. Others warned that it can alienate potential allies, especially on the political right, who care about the natural world but recoil from language sometimes associated with the left.

The problem of personhood

How to advance Indigenous knowledge systems within existing Western legal traditions was the focus of a May workshop convened by Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Program, where lawyers, scholars, and community organizers gathered to examine the movement’s promise and limits.

There was no agreement that “rights of nature” is the right phrase.

Many participants described rivers, salmon, forests, and watersheds as relatives. The challenge is that courts need categories, so Western law often translates those relationships into terms such as rights, personhood, property, standing, injury, and remedy. That vocabulary can turn ecological harm into a claim a judge can hear. But it can also obscure a broader understanding of human responsibility to protect the life systems that have sustained people for millennia.

The problem is especially clear in the language of personhood.

In 2019, the Yurok Tribe adopted a resolution recognizing the Klamath River in northern California and Oregon as a legal person, granting the river rights that had generally been reserved for people and corporations and allowing Yurok tribal court to hear claims over harms against it.

The wording drew mixed reactions.

For Juliette Jackson, an Indigenous rights advocate and enrolled member of The Klamath Tribes, the association with corporate personhood tarnishes the term.

“There are negative connotations about personhood, and I think that is a great example of why that terminology is maybe not the right fit for this rights-of-nature movement,” Jackson said.

Jackson prefers language that stresses the inherent bonds between Indigenous peoples and nature, emphasizing animals and rivers as kin and ancestors. “They’re not just people,” she said. “They came before us. They’re like our ancestors, guiding us. If they suffer, we suffer.”

Bibeau, the Minnesota Chippewa attorney, made a similar point. Personhood, he said, is not necessarily a compliment.

“I know it’s a shortcut to explain [the concept of rights of nature], but we wouldn’t cast personhood on somebody,” Bibeau said. “That might be seen as an insult. We just see [nature] as our relatives whom we have a sacred obligation to protect.”

But for Samuel Gensaw III, a Yurok Tribe member and fisherman who lives on the Klamath River, the wording is immaterial if it restores the natural habitat and spring salmon.  

Since the river received personhood status from his tribe, “I really don’t feel the difference,” Gensaw said. “For me, it’s more of a language thing, a way of explaining something, to help you understand.”

All perspectives expressed in the Harvard Climate Brief are those of the authors and not of Harvard University or the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Any errors are the authors’ own. The Harvard Climate Brief is edited by an interdisciplinary team of Harvard faculty.