Manitou Pollinators, a group based out of Manitou Springs in Colorado, recognized the significance of pollinators and now works to enhance the natural environment to restore and aid their populations. The Manitou Pollinators is working with the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER) to establish the first Rights of Pollinators Ordinance and are improving pollinator protection through other local projects in their community.

Once a place for the community to gather and for children to play, Tar Creek is now unsafe for the people of Miami, Oklahoma, due to water pollution from lead and zinc mining in the region.  

 The Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD) Agency advocates for the natural environment in response to this contamination. In our interview, Rebecca Jim, the Executive Director of the LEAD Agency, shares how the organization aims to restore Tar Creek to its former glory.

Healthy soils are a core component of healthy ecosystems. Healthy soils are essential for water filtration, drought resilience, reduction of runoff and erosion, and the mitigation of climate change by the maintenance and increase of soil carbon, keeping carbon in the ground. Functioning and healthy soils are also necessary for productive agriculture, crop yields, and nutrient density in food.

Human-induced climate change is touching every aspect of our world, altering the Earth’s chemical and physical cycles. Rising global temperatures are causing extreme weather, threats to human health, economic disruption, ocean acidification, drought, social instability, species extinction, ecosystem harm, and a wide range of other impacts.

Climate change threatens the very survival of the human species on this planet, as well as the survival of other species and ecosystems.

In recent years, faith leaders have taken notable steps toward the recognition of legal rights of nature. Pope Francis declared that the environment has "rights." The Church of Sweden has included the rights of nature within its educational program.  The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines has called for the recognition of the rights of nature, and the United Church of Christ in the U.S. has adopted a rights of nature policy. 

Learn more about the growing and important role that faith communities have in the global Rights of Nature movement.

The Rights of Nature Land Trust was established to assist landowners to protect their land through Rights of Nature Easements.  

Landowners have typically used “conservation easements” to permanently protect their land from certain kinds of development. 

Rights of Nature Easements build on the ability of conservation easements to protect land from development, while adding a recognition that ecosystems on the land have certain rights that must be protected.  Those rights may include the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and be restored.  The landowner can enforce the legal rights recognized by the easement against anyone interfering with those rights.