1. Resistance to extractivism

Although by no means its sole inspiration, dissatisfaction with extractivism has motivated attempts to recognize nature’s rights. This antagonistic relationship between nature’s rights and extractivism has been particularly highlighted by movements in the Global South, where there is a long history of corporations’ exploitation of natural resources, often in partnership with states’ governments. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues that RoN has helped to revive an essential discussion about “how Latin Americans want to go on living.” Escobar is particularly referring to extractivism, as he notes that RoN represents one alternative to the dominant growth-oriented “‘civilizational model’ of globalized development.”Footnote ²³

RoN challenges this model of social, environmental, and economic organization by treating nature as a legal rightsholder. Such a strategy casts nature as a subject rather than an object, rejecting Western Law’s understanding of non-human nature as a collection of “independent resources” meant to be utilized.Footnote ²⁴ As the cultural historian and theologian Thomas Berry influentially puts it, this view perceives “the universe as composed of objects to be exploited rather than as subjects to be communed with.”Footnote ²⁵ Nature’s rights support a shift toward the latter way of understanding existence. By undermining the distinction between humans and non-human nature, the recognition of RoN weakens the union between “human exceptionalism, extractivism, and legal status.”Footnote ²⁶ When the sense that humans stand apart from other life is questioned by a revision in legal status, extractivism loses a crucial support. By removing the exclusive human claim to the status of subjecthood, nature’s rights disrupt the previously indivisible connection between the human subject and their unhindered “appropriation of the outside world.”Footnote ²⁷ RoN consequently have the capacity to alter conceptions of what it means to be a subject.

Nature’s rights have already played an important role in efforts to support the ability of communities to impact decisions regarding “development” and extractive projects. They have facilitated partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups, enabling them to more powerfully oppose a “functionalist and extractivist notion of nature” derived from scientific and capitalistic perspectives.Footnote ²⁸ Emerging from local activism, RoN litigation has confronted the subjection of particular ecosystems to market-driven intensive extraction with new legal arguments. In fact, courts’ rulings on RoN have themselves critiqued extractive projects. The judge who ruled at the appellate stage for the A’i Cofán de Sinangoe people and against state agencies puts in stark terms the contrast between human/non-human interdependence and extractivism. The decision holds state-issued mining concessions on Cofán territory to be invalid. It states that the Constitution called for an awareness of interdependence between humans and non-human nature, rather than the state defendants’ reliance on the “normative categories of domination, simple exploitation or utility.”Footnote ²⁹

As I observed earlier, the RTTC has not had similar impact. Despite this, advocates and scholars nonetheless have considered its agenda to be capable of fomenting dramatic change.Footnote ³⁰ Their views are in accordance with Lefebvre’s conception of this right, which he formulates as a radical insistence on a “transformed and renewed right to urban life.”Footnote ³¹ Lefebvre is interested in the relationship between urban space and extractivism. He contends that the RTTC encompassed the opportunity to “control investment into space.”Footnote ³² This definition reflects his sense that the central area of cities has become “the object of consumption, and is valued as such.”Footnote ³³

Land can be valued based on either how its use can fulfill people’s needs and desires, or what commodities it can be exchanged for. This distinction between use value and exchange value helps to clarify the relationship of the RTTC to extractivism. The dominance of exchange value and its commodification of space enables the extraction of value from urban space. For urban geographer David Harvey, any effort to claim the RTTC would take the shape of popular resistance to the accumulation of capital.Footnote ³⁴ The right arises as a result of considering the city to be a shared endeavor. This perception casts as illegitimate the concentration of power in any single actor.Footnote ³⁵ RTTC is a vehicle for the reordering of priorities, so that “market logic (exchange value) loses ground to civic logic (use value).”Footnote ³⁶

As with rights of nature, RTTC scholars identify the strength accorded property rights as a crucial support for market relations. For 200 years or more, the rights which accompanied property ownership allowed its owners an almost unconstrained hand to shape cities in order to increase to the fullest extent spaces’ exchange value. This maximization is in service of an extractivist imperative. Popular claims to urban space contest this preeminence of property ownership. The “right to appropriation” which is among the cluster of rights that compose a collective RTTC favors residents’ use value rather than the market relations that benefit private businesses.Footnote ³⁷

For city inhabitants to enjoy this right, the ability of exchange value to rationalize space must be curtailed. At the same time, the influence of use value in generating possibilities for the organization of life has to be strengthened. Lefebvre ties the RTTC to this reordering of priorities. The right entails the opportunity “to produce urban life on new terms (unfettered by the demands of exchange value).”Footnote ³⁸ Exchange value can impinge upon use value, impacting “the particular uses we want and need.”Footnote ³⁹ If exchange value ordered space and priorities, the opportunity for local people to take a central role in the creation of city life would be greatly hampered.

Housing is a key sector where the extractive priorities that organize city spaces can be challenged by the RTTC.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Ecuador, though, housing policy after the 2008 Constitution suggests that its inclusion of the RTTC did not substantially alter attempts at the national level to alter how city spaces had previously been valued. A National Development Plan for the years from 2009 to 2013 incorporated a commitment to citizens’ enjoyment of this right.Footnote ⁴¹ However, the approach to housing continued its previous focus on providing subsidies to the public as a way to maintain demand. This policy had reinforced the push of subsidized housing toward the edges of cities and restricted the opportunities of people with few resources to access it.Footnote ⁴²

2. Difference supports local decision-making

The demand that land be valued for the uses people can make of it rather than what it can be exchanged for makes a good transition to a second convergence. This is the insistence on the importance of protecting the ability of a place’s inhabitants to organize life differently. Local people’s meaningful participation in decision-making processes helps to maintain this capability. The prioritization of market relations in the production of space, though, leaves little room for consequential, essential participation. Difference can best flourish absent the rationalizing and commodifying imperatives of what Lefebvre identifies as capitalist abstract space.Footnote ⁴³ When a space has a defined “functional and economic” purpose, the “degree of diversity” able to flourish there is limited.Footnote ⁴⁴ This is an interdependent relationship, as the right to difference would contribute to an affirmation of the primacy of “the use value of urban life and nature over predominant economic value.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Lefebvre considers the right to difference to be inseparable from the RTTC.Footnote ⁴⁶ This right is embodied not only in other people but in “different experiences.”Footnote ⁴⁷ These were not commercialized experiences or leisure activities. Instead, Lefebvre considers the difference which he values to be opposed to commercialization, as it constitutes a way to disrupt the dynamics “of homogenization, fragmentation, and uneven development” produced by collaboration between the state and capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁸ According to one of Lefebvre’s most prominent interpreters, the distinctiveness of urban space resides in the coexistence “of very different worlds and value-systems, of ethnic, cultural, and social groups, activities, and knowledge.”Footnote ⁴⁹

These interpretations of the right to difference resemble liberal and cosmopolitan celebrations of the city. Scholar of religion and politics Suzanne Klein Schaarsberg points out that liberal diversity, “or the recognition that people go about living their lives differently,” depends “on a single reality doctrine.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This outlook upholds the division between human subjects and non-human objects, inevitably leaving humans to occupy the central role in how we understand agency.Footnote ⁵¹ Lefebvre, though, departs from liberal diversity. Much as use value stands in opposition to an exchange value based on the standardizing effect of money, Lefebvre suggests that cities are spaces where “multiple realities” coincide, rather than multiple perspectives on a single reality.Footnote ⁵² This is what other scholars call a pluriverse: the “recognition of the coexistence of many worlds in an acknowledgment of diverse cosmologies, in which Western universalism is but one.”Footnote ⁵³ This readiness to welcome multiple realities may be a function of Lefebvre’s focus on the generative nature of space.Footnote ⁵⁴ Space acts upon all forms and sites of social and political life.Footnote ⁵⁵ This outlook broadens our cast of protagonists, so that action and agency do not reside solely with humans.

Space, of course, was not the only actor on the stage. Lefebvre was writing about the RTTC before the “relational turn” in geography in the decade of the 2000s, when relationality became a more commonly employed analytical framework.Footnote ⁵⁶ Relationality can be understood as paying attention to the “inextricable mutual interdependence of all beings and things.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Scholars suggest that Lefebvre was working with an understanding of space as relational. His criticism of abstract space, for instance, centers on its rejection of a mutually integral connection “between subjects and space.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The distinguishing mark of abstract space is the assumption that its “(formal) content and (material) container” are unconcerned with one another.Footnote ⁵⁹ This formulation supposes an active and independent human subject and passive space. For Lefebvre, though, the process of interpreting space “serves to generate consciousness.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Space is therefore entangled with our own sense of selfhood.Footnote ⁶¹ This inseparability of humans’ subjectivity from space supports local people’s leading role in deciding how that space is organized and managed.

Lefebvre’s criticism of abstract space resonates with the arguments of advocates of rights of nature, who have maintained that modernity has obscured the relations between people and non-human nature. Lefebvre considers capitalist cities adept at segregating people from the land: the preeminence of property rights has the effect of obscuring the role of land in “the web of urban social connections.” Members of the urban public are part of a network of interdependence, but this participation becomes clear only when they meet in “meaningful interactions.” The RTTC can be understood as a means of acknowledging and valuing the place of city space in that web.Footnote ⁶²

The relational currents in Lefebvre’s understanding of space imply the existence of difference that is irreducible. The complex relations between people and space resist standardization. Each place must be taken on its own, as a never entirely stable outcome of a particular set of relations. A relational perspective also helps to support Lefebvre’s insistence that local people play a leading role in making decisions about the spaces they not only inhabit but produce through their active presence.

Similar to proponents of a RTTC, advocates of nature’s rights claim that the maintenance of difference is key to autonomy and resistance to extractivism. This commitment to difference can extend beyond the acceptance of diverse perceptions of a single reality, to an acknowledgment of a world with many realities. The recognition of legal personhood for specific ecosystems, which has occurred in Aotearoa New Zealand in three instances, has sustained a greater range of difference than was politically and legally present previously. This recognition served as a compromise in negotiations between the Crown government and Indigenous Māori iwi, or tribes, who were seeking a return of land from which they had been dispossessed. The recognition of Te Urewera Mountain as a legal person has provided the Tūhoe iwi with the opportunity to practice a distinctly different kind of forest conservation, one that recognizes humans as an inseparable part of nature.Footnote ⁶³ The recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person has provided political and legal space for legal pluralism, as Indigenous law has been able to shape river management procedures and decisions.Footnote ⁶⁴

A focus on a specific people’s interaction with a specific ecosystem can not only contribute to legal pluralism. It may also support the treatment of nature as a living entity. To perceive nature in this sort of way clarifies how RoN may affirm the coexistence of multiple “worlds and knowledges” rather than a single and uniform one.Footnote ⁶⁵ A living nature is a multiplicity. The existence of multiple natures constitutes a foundation for the recognition of different ways of organizing collective life.

Some misgiving regarding nature’s rights is nonetheless based on the concern that the legal tool of rights may unintentionally narrow the range of conceivable difference. This misgiving is part of a larger discussion over how we should conceive of nature. To consider nature capable of holding rights seems to credit it with a coherence which some scholars question. It may be just one of many efforts to pin down “its unstable meaning” and yoke that meaning to ideological purposes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Treating nature as a given is a folly, as efforts to define what is natural just lead to disagreement.Footnote ⁶⁷ Making nature into a rightsholder would seem to risk converting “all of nature into a subject,” which would deprive it of “its otherness.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The breadth and tools of nature’s rights have each been considered capable of limiting our ability to perceive difference. Some scholars look warily at universalistic RoN laws, like Ecuador’s constitutional provisions, which aspire to protect all of a nature within a political jurisdiction.Footnote ⁶⁹ This method of protection may leave no room for multiple natures, but simply reinforces “Western understandings of” non-humans.Footnote ⁷⁰ What we have seen, though, is that the Constitutional Court has qualified the universalism of those provisions. Its 2022 Estrellita decision, which confirms that individual undomesticated animals hold rights, formulates the “interspecies principle” as a means of distinguishing between what those rights demand for different species. Different species will have different rights, due to what the court pointed out were their disparate “life cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes.”Footnote ⁷¹

Second, some scholars claim that there is risk to a rights-based approach which treats not only individual species but also natural features like rivers as living entities. The extension of legal personhood to nature could meld its many forms “into an atomistic, individual actor within the Euro-Western legal framework.”Footnote ⁷² The use of anthropocentric tools in the service of ostensibly non-anthropocentric aspirations is charged with tension.Footnote ⁷³ Environmental humanities scholar Robert Macfarlane appears to refer to similar misgivings when he asserts that thinking of rivers as alive does not necessarily mean that human life is the inescapable mold into which rivers must be squeezed. Rather, to think this way is to expand “the category of ‘life.’”Footnote ⁷⁴ Macfarlane considers life to be equivalent to rightsholding, noting that by incorporating nature’s rights in the Constitution, Ecuador had emphatically responded affirmatively to the question “Is a river alive?”Footnote ⁷⁵

Understanding an ecosystem like a river or forest as alive is one means of multiplying natures. Another is to focus on the ways in which places are shaped by human/non-human interactions.Footnote ⁷⁶ Biocultural rights in particular reflect a perspective that recognizes the existence of mutually constitutive relations between a place and people. The Atrato court decision issued by Columbia’s Constitutional Court in 2016 recognizes biocultural rights for the Atrato River and the Indigenous communities and descendants of formerly enslaved people living in proximity to it. Drawing on such examples, human rights scholar Anna Arstein-Kerslake and co-authors suggest the concept of “relational personhood” to keep focus on the interdependent relations humans maintain with non-humans.Footnote ⁷⁷ They argue that law can insist on “relational closeness” as an indispensable characteristic for a human group’s effective exercise of the responsibility to represent nature’s interests.Footnote ⁷⁸ This focus on relationality, as is the case with the RTTC, helps to justify those human communities’ central roles in decision-making processes.

3. Rights and reliance on the state

The RoN present challenges to political order by potentially giving local and regional bodies greater authority over decisions that would impact their ecosystems. In some situations, those rights have facilitated the ability of local people to exert influence over development projects. Court cases in Ecuador have played a role in expanding these opportunities. Scholars point out that these are political rights, in that they impact the distribution of power among human communities.Footnote ⁷⁹ The same is true of the RTTC, particularly in its form that emphasizes popular authority over urban development and space.

These approaches’ reliance on rights, though, may undermine their ability to create the sort of change which their advocates envision. Courts themselves are of course state actors and depending on the political context may have more or less ability to constrain other state actors. Furthermore, the law, and rights more specifically, may be only partly able to account for the relational perspectives that inform each of these approaches. Legal instruments can only poorly comprehend interdependent and fluid relationships. Law has a built-in “reductionist bias,” in that it needs for there to be a particular injured party and a particular party accused of causing that harm.Footnote ⁸⁰ This impulse squares poorly with a worldview that sees everything as related to everything else.

In addition to the difficulties of translating relationality into law, the interpretation and implementation of rights can be captured by state administration. The early history of Ecuador’s rights of nature provisions provides an example of state co-option. Arguably, that is what occurred in the years immediately following the 2008 Constitution’s ratification. The many rights outlined in that document rely upon the “ultimately arbitrary power of the state,” as it is unlikely that the state government could enforce all of the human and non-human rights granted by the Constitution at the same time.Footnote ⁸¹ The presidential administration of Rafael Correa, who was in office during and after the drafting of the Constitution, used RoN in an “instrumental” manner, employing them against impoverished and small-scale miners while pursuing a large-scale extractivist agenda in partnership with multinational mining corporations.Footnote ⁸² In 2015, Correa’s government also sought to ensure that all accusations about violations of RoN went through the national ombudsman’s office.Footnote ⁸³ This effort to consolidate power over which RoN claims seemed to contradict the 2008 Constitution, which permitted any person to “call upon public authorities” to apply nature’s rights.Footnote ⁸⁴

The treatment of nature as a legal person in recent agreements between the Crown government of Aotearoa New Zealand and Māori iwi also has the potential to simultaneously integrate and abate Indigenous demands for autonomy. Although some scholars credit the governance arrangement for the former national park Te Urewera with creating opportunities for the Māori to take the lead in managing the land, others assert that the agreement risks the co-option and neutralization of Māori land claims.Footnote ⁸⁵ Not only did that arrangement avoid the restoration of Māori land rights, but it also created obstacles to their success. The land’s new legal status can operate as a “containment device for” Indigenous territorial claims.Footnote ⁸⁶ Political ecologist Brad Coombes’ interviews with members of the Tūhoe people illustrate the perception that personhood amounted to deflection meant to avoid directly resolving their land demands. Some Tūhoe view the Act’s promise of shared administration as inconsequential and cynical when unaccompanied by land rights.Footnote ⁸⁷ Even with a two-thirds majority on the governing board, the Tūhoe do not have the necessary representation to overcome non-Tūhoe opposition. Consensus is therefore still necessary. Consequently, inclusion of the Māori can have the perverse result of undermining their prospects.Footnote ⁸⁸

But while a rights-focused strategy may rely on the state for their interpretation and implementation, rights themselves are not static. Constricted interpretations of a rights-focused strategy as just “making claims on the State” miss how activists re-work the meaning of those rights. By putting forward their own ideas about what the implementation of a particular right entails, activists dispute the state’s power to define that right and its implications.Footnote ⁸⁹ Recent court cases have demonstrated the capability of nature’s rights to shift decision-making power and thus relations between communities and the state. Although Ecuador’s Constitution provides no ability for Indigenous or non-Indigenous communities to veto extractive projects, the Constitutional Court’s A’i Cofán decision held that extractive plans can go ahead absent a community’s approval only in extraordinary situations.Footnote ⁹⁰ Its Los Cedros decision, moreover, mandates the creation of pro-active plans, seeking to integrate human economic activity with the protection of nature’s rights. This points to a continual role for local communities, rather than one which is reactive and intermittent.Footnote ⁹¹

The continual engagement of local communities is also important to the RTTC. Local people’s participation in decision-making processes may allow the RTTC to contest the modern “political-economic relationships” which have been at the heart of how urban space has been valued.Footnote ⁹² However, the attention the term received from academics, policymakers, and activist groups in the early 2000s led to “conceptual bloating.”Footnote ⁹³ The concept’s adaptability is most clearly seen in the work of organizations seeking to identify and claim specific rights which would fall under the umbrella of the RTTC, but which leave the city fundamentally unchanged. The World Charter for the RTTC endorsed by the World Social Forum refers to a multitude of rights, including “to cultural memory, telecommunications, retraining,” and others.Footnote ⁹⁴ Initiatives like the World Charter conceive of the RTTC as an extension of established “liberal-democratic rights.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Their goal is “inclusion,” or the process of bringing marginalized people into “the structures of government and the formal economy.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Critics point out that this goal will not address the practices that are responsible for creating the disparities that these specific rights are supposed to address.Footnote ⁹⁷ It would be of dubious worth to Lefebvre, who considers the RTTC a means of moving “beyond the state.”Footnote ⁹⁸ These rights, moreover, do not threaten the protection which property rights enjoy. The emphasis on access distanced the RTTC from its initial radical meaning “as the right to full enjoyment of the wealth and culture socially generated and concentrated in the cities.” That ambition demands a significantly different society.Footnote ⁹⁹

In Lefebvre’s and Harvey’s interpretations, the RTTC is itself a challenge to order. Claiming this right directly involves questioning the existing economic order, and doing so repeatedly. Efforts to claim the RTTC have been co-opted in the past. There is always the potential that the initial desire to preserve “vibrant neighborhoods” will instead contribute to gentrification or to the growth of tourism. Once “liberated,” spaces do not necessarily stay so. They and the “oppositional practices” that helped bring about their transformation may always be re-incorporated into prevailing spatial and social order, quite possibly through the mechanism of rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

4. Relations between the right to the city and rights of nature

Scholars such as urban political ecologist Erik Swyngedouw criticize the common practice of placing nature outside a political frame.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Swyngedouw contends that the ubiquitous idea of sustainability promotes “a post-political arrangement” kept together by anxiety and a determination to maintain as much as possible of the current order. This focus on sustainability narrows both the space for meaningful debate and the range of political choices.Footnote ¹⁰² Swyngedouw therefore urges the “politicization of the environment.” This endeavor has two aspects: first, the consideration of several difficult issues: the identification not only of our preferred “socio-environmental arrangements” but also how to realize our aspirations for the intertwined organization of the environment and human society. Second, such conversations should not assume mastery of nature, whose fundamental unpredictability people must account for.Footnote ¹⁰³ There is tension in this appeal. On the one hand, it seeks political discussion over fundamental questions of the organization of life, space, and nature. On the other hand, it suggests this exercise of political will be tempered with a recognition of nature’s ability to escape and thwart our expectations. Despite humans’ ability to make decisions about nature, they should not presume command of it.

The RTTC and RoN can invigorate these debates. Urban residents have claimed the RTTC through their use of public green spaces. Residents of Athens, Greece considered two parks as tantamount to “shared living spaces” that had to be sheltered from privatizing courses of action which threatened to inhibit inhabitants’ access.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Efforts to create and cultivate urban gardens in New Orleans led to a revival of residents’ use and management of “neighborhood green space.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The issues these activists have highlighted revolve around precisely the sort of questions Swyngedouw considers to be typically neglected. While RTTC can push the politics of urban nature to the forefront of conversations, the recognition of nature’s legal rights to evolve, be restored, and flourish can help to curb human pretensions to mastery over it.

Each set of rights-claims has something to contribute to political conversations about the sort of relations with non-human nature which humans wish to promote. But that contribution will be curbed if we do not address the tension between the encouragement of expressions of popular will and the renunciation of mastery over the objects of that will, namely space and nature. To begin to do so we must clarify the relationship of these sets of rights to one another. Article 31 of Ecuador’s Constitution states that the exercise of the RTTC requires attention to “the social and environmental function of property.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The rights of nature similarly limit property rights in favor of a common, ecologically based good. The Constitution’s Article 71 identifies nature’s ability to fulfill its environmental functions as one of its rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Defining what the environmental functions of nature look like in urban spaces would create common ground for these sets of rights.

Ecuadorian courts have identified some relations between these rights. In its Monjas River decision, the Constitutional Court perceives them as complimentary. The “natural dimension” of the RTTC included humans’ right to live in harmony with nature, a condition which would entail respect for nature’s rights. More specifically, the city government’s plans for urban development should allow nature to “maintain and regenerate its vital cycles,” which are two of its identified rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Machángara decision later issued by a provincial court also refers to this goal of harmony between humans and nature, noting that the terrible situation at the river, such as its use as a repository for garbage, illustrated its absence.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The conspicuousness of “harmony” in discussions of nature’s rights brings potential pitfalls. Difficult choices about environmental and social health too often are glossed over, supplanted by a hazy goal of human-non-human harmony.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is possible that the notion of harmony will have a depoliticizing effect, but it is not inevitable. It partly depends on what we mean by “harmony.” C. Patrick Doncaster and James Bullock maintain that if we think of harmony as a never-complete synthesis of human activities and natural cycles, we may open up political debates about human interactions with nature. Continual efforts to integrate human activity with natural processes will make room for “a plurality of approaches.”Footnote ¹¹¹

The rights of nature and the RTTC each attend to different elements of the aspiration to re-politicize nature and urban space. The RTTC’s prioritization of how use of the land can fulfill human needs and desires provides an anthropocentric justification for the protection of nature’s processes. Local influence permitted to operate only within the parameters set by market logics may be ineffectual, unable to allow the flourishing of difference which advocates of the RTTC and RoN have deemed crucial. The limitation of the influence of the market on urban spaces can help a broad variety of socio-environmental arrangements flourish. These arrangements may more easily accommodate nature’s rights than can arrangements which are located in space whose value is based on what commodities it can be exchanged for.

5. Cities as Sites of Nature’s Rights

These two sets of rights converge on at least three points: criticism of extractivism, a dedication to the maintenance of difference, and an ambiguity in regard to state authority. Identifying these confluences can help to clarify what has been nature’s ambiguous role in the human RTTC. Lefebvre believed in the agency of space. The same cannot be said about his opinion on nature. Urban geographer Neil Smith argues that Lefebvre considered nature “closed as a venue for political change.”Footnote ¹¹² Rights of nature, however, offers a way to recognize that non-human nature is not something to be managed as a passive object.

That is one way these approaches can supplement one another. The RTTC’s prioritization of the ways that land can be used to fulfill human needs combined with its recognition of interdependence as a fundamental fact of life can help to establish nature’s rights in urban spaces. In New Orleans, the RTTC has been claimed in neighborhoods by residents who challenged “governance over urban nature.”Footnote ¹¹³ Such governance can occur in conjunction with nature’s rights, much as Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has encouraged. This governance of urban rightsholding nature may provide new opportunities for local residents to influence how that land is used, rather than shutting human activity out from these areas. Nature’s status as a legal rightsholder does not forbid human activity in non-human natural spaces.

Recent court decisions and legislation in Ecuador and Spain have taken steps to integrate human activity with nature’s rights. In its Los Cedros decision, the Constitutional Court mandates the creation of a committee composed of officials and local people. Among the committee’s duties was the promotion of “economic activities for the surrounding communities” which are consistent with nature’s rights.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Spanish law, which identifies the Mar Menor lagoon as a legal person, identifies several stakeholders who will sit on the monitoring committee for the lagoon. These include representatives from business, fishing, agricultural, and livestock associations.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Similar treatment of rightsholding places as compatible with some forms of human influence would be unavoidable in urban spaces. The presumption that rights of nature necessarily excludes human presence and action has limited its perceived place and usefulness. Developing those rights’ application in cities would forcefully weaken this presumption.