This paper examines Ecuador’s Rights of Nature following the Los Cedros Constitutional Court ruling in 2021. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it explores how legal recognition of ecosystems as rights-bearing subjects intersects with Andean cosmology, conservation governance, extractive pressures, and local livelihoods in cloud forest communities, and how storytelling translates these changes into lived practice. It traces the historical and political context of the case while showing how Ecuador’s landmark environmental and legal achievements are increasingly threatened by authoritarian political reforms. The paper argues that preserving these gains is both a national and global imperative, requiring local and international solidarity to defend the rights of Nature, democratic institutions, and the communities that protect them. It calls for ecological justice grounded in interdependence among human and more-than-human life, emphasizing that the future of Rights of Nature depends not only on constitutional recognition but also on sustained collective action. By situating Los Cedros within broader struggles over democracy, conservation, and extractivism, the paper demonstrates how legal victories remain fragile without continued public engagement, institutional accountability, and transnational support, offering lessons for environmental justice movements confronting similar threats around the world today.

The impact of nature’s rights on the legal system and in the world depends in part on perceptions of its compatibility with anthropocentric rights. The presumption that the protection of nature’s rights excludes human action has limited its perceived place and usefulness. Siting nature’s rights in cities contests this presumption. To do so, this article puts rights of nature and the human right to the city in conversation. It draws mostly on Ecuador, the only country with both types of rights enshrined in its constitution. While these appear to be very different sets of rights, this article analyzes three points of convergence. The first is the centrality of critiques of an extractivist model of collective life. The second is the insistence on the maintenance of various forms of difference, including different ways of living, which is meant to disrupt the political, economic, and cultural circuits of extractivism. The third is an ambiguous orientation toward established structures of political authority. Based on these convergences, this article argues that rights of nature and the right to the city may help to politicize the production of urban nature and broaden possible socio-environmental futures.

This article examines how constitutional courts in Latin America have brought animal protection into constitutional law despite limited constitutional texts. It asks how and why courts in Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil have become global leaders in recognizing rights for animals and other more-than-human entities, and the role Indigenous epistemologies played in this process. Through a comparative analysis of constitutional case law, the article argues that courts in these three countries have developed an unwritten constitutional animal law through creative interpretation: Ecuador by extending the rights of nature to individual animals, Colombia by deriving an animal protection mandate from its “ecological Constitution,” and Brazil by transforming an anticruelty clause into a biocentric framework through regional dialog. These developments cannot be understood as straightforward incorporations of Indigenous epistemologies. Instead, they are better described as products of “entangled legalities,” formed through ongoing interactions among Indigenous knowledge, Western law, and other normative orders. This approach shows that the transformative consequences of the rights of nature and related concepts are indeterminate and depend on how these doctrines are mobilized. The article concludes by proposing that this jurisprudence represents an “animal law from the South,” shaped by the distinctive role of courts in Global South jurisdictions.

The landmark Rights of Nature case for the Machángara River in Quito, Ecuador, is examined. Long degraded by untreated wastewater, industrial discharges, and urbanization, the Machángara River became the focus of a citizen-led lawsuit supported by scientists, academics, and indigenous representatives. In 2024, an Ecuadorian court recognized the river as a rights-bearing entity and ordered the municipality to implement a 27-point restoration plan. The case demonstrates how Rights of Nature offers a more effective legal strategy than traditional loss-and-damage claims, correcting power asymmetries, expanding legal standing, and shifting the burden of proof from plaintiffs to authorities responsible for environmental protection. The ruling catalyzed public awareness, institutional learning, and political commitments, culminating in a November 2025 pledge by the mayor to clean Quito’s rivers by 2040. It also sparked new governance structures, such as community groups tasked with monitoring compliance, and encouraged discussion of nature-based solutions despite municipal resistance. The Machángara case highlights the potential of Rights of Nature to transform urban environmental governance by integrating science, community action, and legal innovation, positioning Quito once again as a global reference in watershed protection.

Fungi offer a striking way to rethink the legal foundations of the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. While RoN seeks to recognize nature as a rights-bearing subject rather than an object of human use, its legal and philosophical frameworks often remain shaped by human-centered models of subjecthood, embedded in arboreal metaphors of trees and forests. This article argues that these arboreal metaphors reproduce stable identities and hierarchical relations, while fungi foreground interdependence, relationality, and distributed agency that unsettle conventional assumptions about legal subjects. Drawing on key RoN cases and debates in philosophy and legal theory, we show how thinking with fungi helps unbind the subject of law by challenging models of subjectivity that stabilize identities, reinforce hierarchy, and project human exceptionalism onto nature.