The Scientists Making the Case for Nature’s Rights

A growing number of scientists are backing laws recognizing that nature has inherent rights and intrinsic value. A group of wetlands scientists wants the critical ecosystems they study to be next.

VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe—On a bright and clear day, Gillian T. Davies reached the end of a winding dirt track where armed guards waited. 

The ecologist from Massachusetts was attending an international conference on wetlands that would influence the future of the world’s fastest-disappearing ecosystems. The sessions were not going well. 

So, on the conference’s break day, Davies hired a local guide and headed deep into the African bush to find one of the threatened species that frequent the wetlands she’s fighting for. 

The guards, clad with AK-47-style rifles slung over their shoulders, were a round-the-clock team protecting a crash of white rhinoceroses from poachers. Davies felt a surge of gratitude for the men, but wondered: What had her species become that such a thing was necessary? 

The scene was a visceral echo of what she saw playing out at the conference, a meeting of the parties to the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, one of the oldest environmental protection treaties. Despite governments’ vows to protect them, one-fifth of Earth’s wetlands have been destroyed. Of what remains, a quarter are in ecological distress. Few people know either of those facts or why they matter.

Vilified in the past as wastelands, the watery ecosystems are in fact a linchpin of planetary stability, with their moist soils sequestering more carbon dioxide per unit than forests. With unmatched efficiency, they act as Earth’s kidneys, filtering pollution and recharging drinking water sources while preventing storm damage and flooding. For scores of communities, wetlands are a cradle of culture, a source of sustenance and a home. 

As scientists have flocked to the movement in recent years, they’ve given it a new layer of credibility—and enforceability. They’re helping to craft laws rooted in scientific principles, collaborating with local communities to collect evidence for court cases and drawing on fields like ecology and neuroscience to provide a scientific basis for the movement’s core philosophies, ideas that Indigenous peoples have already validated through centuries of territorial stewardship. 

Still, Davies’ push for wetlands’ rights is one of the movement’s biggest challenges yet. Unlike forests, wetlands are widely misunderstood and overlooked, even among the environmentally conscious. 

For now, though, as Davies pushed through a thicket of shrubs with the guards’ assent, the only thing on her mind was what might lie on the other side. And there they were, five magnificent white rhinoceroses, their thick, soft bodies resting in the dappled shade. 

Standing in their presence, Davies simply watched the slow, rhythmic breathing of the napping creatures, feeling a mixture of awe for what remained and sorrow for what was being lost. This profound paradox is what fueled her. Soon, she would have to channel that resolve back into the work ahead.

The Draining of the Fens

For centuries, humans have assaulted wetlands, a destructive impulse that began with the Roman empire, spread to the Dutch in the 15th century and then to England. There, a consortium of wealthy landowners and King Charles I embarked on one of the world’s earliest ecocides.

England’s fens, a type of peat marsh stretching over hundreds of thousands of acres, provided flood protection and freshwater to rural inhabitants and habitat to countless species. The landowners and king, however, saw them through a different lens. They drained the fens to convert wetland to profitable farmland, a move they saw as a triumph of human engineering and a way to civilize the locals into taxpaying farmers.

But as historian Eric H. Ash detailed in his book, “The Draining of the Fens,” this monumental undertaking unleashed a torrent of unintended consequences. The exposed peat soil shrank, causing the land to sink and worsening flooding. Species disappeared. And the forcible separation of people from their lands caused chaos that fed the tensions leading to the English Civil War.

According to rights of nature advocates, the draining of the fens was more than a misguided engineering project. It was an act fueled by a flawed ideology that still motivates decisions today.

In the advocates’ telling, with the rise of factories and cities, humans began to see themselves as separate from, and superior to, the rest of the natural world. Ecosystems became collections of resources, and the rise of Western science ushered in an approach to studying nature that involved breaking it down into smaller components. Earth came to be viewed as a machine with interacting parts. 

This worldview was institutionalized in legal systems. Property rights gave landowners the authority to clear-cut forests, drain wetlands and mine mountains, viewing these acts as productive use of land. Animals were classified as chattel, like furniture and tools. 

In this system, the law didn’t protect ecosystems, it protected the right of owners to exploit them.

New technologies, a booming human population and globalizing economies demanded more land for farming, industry and urban development. Wetlands, more than any other ecosystem, have paid the price, disappearing three times faster than forests, even as their critical importance to planetary and human wellbeing became clear.

As countries gathered in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 to adopt the Wetlands Convention, U.S. President Richard Nixon was urging Congress to take a new approach to land use. He stressed the critical role wetlands play in flood control and the survival of fish and wildlife, calling them “some of the most beautiful areas left on the continent.” Nixon declared that a “new maturity is giving rise to a land ethic” that acknowledges how improper land use “affects the public interest and limits the choices that we and our descendants will have.”

Even so, the U.S. government continued allowing oil and gas companies to dredge thousands of miles of Gulf Coast wetlands, permitting the draining of the Everglades for development and converting wetlands in California’s Central Valley to industrial farmland. 

As those habitats have disappeared, so too have the species reliant on them: 84 percent of all freshwater species have declined in population since 1970, while others, from the tiny dragonfly to the mighty Florida panther, are now threatened. 

About half of U.S. wetlands have been destroyed since the nation’s founding. Developing countries are now following the precedent set by wealthy, industrialized countries around the world, razing, filling and polluting the watery ecosystems at alarming rates.

Ecological Thinking

In 1991, as Saddam Hussein was draining the Mesopotamian Marshes to punish their inhabitants for rising up after the U.S. military invasion, Davies was embarking on her first field work as a wetlands ecologist in Massachusetts. 

With measuring tape, an auger, a shovel and some elbow grease, she learned she could unravel the vivid narrative of a wetland’s history through its soil. Each layer provided her with insights into shifts in plant life and land use, while changes in soil color—including surprising hues like blues, greens and oranges—could show saturation changes or evidence of a nutrient-rich past. 

She learned that soil couldn’t be understood in isolation; it was in constant, dynamic interplay with every other part of the wetland. 

Soil density dictates water flow. Plants pull nutrients from the soil and return them when they decompose, while anaerobic microbes remove excess nitrogen, acting as a natural filter. Vast mycorrhizal fungi networks course through the soil, serving as a nutrient highway for plants. The soil itself is a universe of life—a refuge for insects and worms that supports all the plants and animals above it. Each wetland is itself part of an even larger web of interactions unfolding across the planet. 

Davies’ decades of wetland and soil ecology work fundamentally undermined the idea that “humans stand apart from all else on Earth,” she said. 

While many scientific fields are focused on taking things apart, ecology is focused on connections and relationships, mirroring the thinking of Indigenous knowledge systems and philosophies that are the rights of nature movement’s inspiration. All show that humans are part of nature, interdependent with everything in it.

So, when Davies stumbled upon the rights of nature movement in 2019, the idea didn’t surprise her. She considered that living ecosystems were far more like humans than inanimate objects like ships or entities like corporations—both of which have legal rights.

“It made logical sense,” she said.

Cover photo:  Zebras and wildebeests roam around a wetland in Amboseli, Kenya. Credit: Eric Lafforgue/Corbis via Getty Images