Bioneers Podcast - Now Available! Legalizing Nature’s Rights: How Tribal Nations are Leading the Fastest Growing Environmental Movement in History

The Rights of Nature movement launched in 2006, with CDER’s Thomas Linzey working with Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, on the first rights of nature law in the world. Today, the movement is growing fast.

Driven primarily by tribes and citizen-led communities, more than three dozen communities and tribal nations across the U.S. have adopted laws securing the legally enforceable rights of ecosystems, species, and all of nature. Rights include the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve.

In this program, from the 2022 Bioneers Conference, indigenous attorneys Frank Bibeau and Samantha Skenandore, and legal movement leader Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, report from the front lines how they are honing their strategies to protect natural systems for future generations.