The right to vote is at the core of any healthy, functioning democracy. Yet, our democratic rights do not begin and end on Election Day. In the United States, as in a number of other countries, “direct democracy” is increasingly recognized as an important way to make change.

On May 7, we held our first monthly webinar on the Rights of Nature. Presenters Mari Margil and Thomas Linzey discussed the origins of Rights of Nature laws and how the movement to recognize rights of the natural world is building through lawmaking and court decisions in countries across the globe.

By becoming a bearer of rights, nature is now being thrust into the murky realm of legal personhood.  

For decades our laws have been a death sentence for the environment. Now, from the Amazon to Australia, the tide is turning