The Legal Examiner · Growing ‘Rights of Nature’ movement tested in Florida court
By Yvette C. Hammett
Published by The Legal Examiner on July 7, 2020
After Florida’s governor preempted a pending Orange County charter amendment that would protect two rivers, a local advocacy group sued, testing a growing movement known as Rights of Nature.
Gov. Ron DeSantis recently signed the “Clean Waterways Act”, which puts more regulations on septic tanks and wastewater runoff but prevents county and city governments from writing protections for the natural environment that are stricter than those of the state.
The Orange County amendment would grant rights to the rivers and allow people to sue over development projects that threaten to pollute or degrade them.
“Preemptions allow legislatures to be privatized for certain large businesses to clear the decks of laws that interfere with their business interests.”
… The first Rights of Nature laws were formulated in Pittsburgh in 2006 to keep hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, out of the city. The new movement for nature’s rights flowed into about three dozen other communities, mostly as a result of specific projects, like fracking, toxic dumping or aerial pesticide spraying, said Thomas Linzey, senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights.
“Right now, the big one is Orange County,” he said, noting that some Rights of Nature regulations in other states have also been preempted by state government. One such instance occurred in Ohio after the city of Toledo created the Lake Erie Bill of Rights.
“Preemptions allow legislatures to be privatized for certain large businesses to clear the decks of laws that interfere with their business interests,” Linzey said. “We’ve pioneered a legal theory that when a state attempts to use preemption in that fashion, it is unconstitutional to home rule and people at the local level who make decisions about what the future of their community is going to look like.”
