Mongabay: Commentary by Mari Margil featured in Mongabay article-5/20/2021

“It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but Pope Francis, Prince Charles, and judges around the world are now supporting the rights of nature.”

The Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights’ own Mari Margil opens up with a stand-up joke set up, but with a very real point: that the social world at large, and the legal systems are paying attention to the validity of the inherent rights of natural beings. Mari Margi recently provided a commentary piece to Mongabay titled “The Pope, a prince and a judge walk into a bar…to argue for nature’s rights” takes readers on a journey from the belief that nature is a resource to be utilized or conquered, towards a being that we can be in a symbiotic relationship where both the existence of humanity, and the planet, can be sustained.

Mari Margil begins with the notion that in the legal sense, nature is still an item and not a being. Commerce laws have been the vehicle for securing limited protections until the environmental jurisprudence movement. John Locke and Rene Descarte as framers of Enlightenment thinking, and an ongoing social belief that man knows above all, are viewed as the architect of dehumanizing nature in comparison to other cultures.

The commentary continues to discuss the ongoing environmental concerns and the high-profile responses to these events. Countries like Columbia and Ecuador have taken steps to codify the rights to protect nature as a way of respecting the planet, but also ensuring the survival of their own cultures and the stability of their nations. In 2015, Pope Francis took the time to make a papal declaration, the Laudato Si’, which was a progressive statement coming out of Christendom on the rights of nature to exist, but also as an apology of the Church’s role in colonization. During the past decade alone, several courts in international territories have brought forth rulings that erred on the side of the Earth. With statements from figureheads such as Pope Francis and Prince Charles who released his Terra Carta proclamation, it is clear that we are taking small, but pivotal steps, towards a sustainable human-nature relationship.