Paper short abstract:

The 'rights of nature' form part of a powerful contemporary idiom of resistance to large-scale resource extraction, but in practice they have encountered numerous difficulties. This paper evaluates some of the complexities surrounding the 'rights of nature' in Ecuador and the United States.

Paper long abstract:

Since the mid-2000s, a growing transnational movement for the rights of nature has emerged in Ecuador, Bolivia, South Africa, and the United States. This effort to extend rights-based conceptions of personhood to the natural world is an effort fueled by growing frustration over the narrowly economistic valuations of nature too often relied upon by state and corporate actors. It is also an attempt to decisively shift the moral terrain on which cost-benefit analyses of large-scale extractive projects are waged. However, since the mid-2000s, following the inclusion of such rights in the national constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia and the municipal charters of cities all throughout the United States, there has been, I argue in this paper, a marked shift in struggles against large-scale extraction in both countries. While the meanings, functions, and associations of the rights of nature are considerably divergent in Ecuador and the United States, in both countries the most recent responses to natural gas and mineral exploration have been characterized by a return to more traditionally anthropocentric legal framings and moral assertions. Why? Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted in the United States and Ecuador with activists opposed to the extraction of shale gas and gold, I offer a comparative perspective on the use of one of the most powerful contemporary moral idioms of resistance to environmental degradation - the personhood of the natural world - and, in dialogue with Erik Swygendouw, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou, explore what this return to the language of human and community rights might mean in contexts of large-scale resource extraction.