The 20-Year Anniversary of the First Rights of Nature Law
Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth. For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Tamaqua, CELDF is sharing an interview with Cathy Miorelli and CELDF’s Education Director Ben Price as the two recall some of the events and impacts that led to the historic ordinance adoption in 2006. Twenty years ago today, on September 19, 2006, the Tamaqua Borough Council in rural Pennsylvania voted to adopt the Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance which states that “residents, natural communities, and ecosystems shall be considered to be ‘persons’ for purposes of the enforcement of [their] civil rights.” This was the first law to recognize legally enforceable rights for a natural ecosystem in an industrialized nation. It was two years prior to Ecuador’s better-known ratification of the rights of Pachamama (Mother Earth) on August 27, 2008. Today, over 60 local governments and tribal nations in the U.S. and over 35 countries recognize the rights of nature in some way. In the summer of 2006 Ben Price had two years of community organizing experience with CELDF when he got a call from Tamaqua High School nurse Miorelli. Cathy was a dedicated health professional concerned for her students about a state-level plan to import toxic waste to “reclaim” open pit and underground coal mines in the vicinity of the school by filling them with the poisonous refuse. She doubled-down on that commitment by serving as an elected member of the Borough’s Town Council. In that capacity, she asked for CELDF’s help to block the scheme. In 1972, a small California law journal published professor Christopher Stone’s seminal article, “Should trees have standing?” Thirty-four years later, his thought experiment became legal reality when a rural community in Pennsylvania passed the first-ever rights of nature law, and by doing so sparked a global movement. What once was just a “what if” thought experiment devised by Stone to challenge his students was turned into an idea whose time had come. Thanks to Cathy’s commitment to community, and the community’s commitment to common sense and finding a way around the legalized practice of exporting America’s poison-laden waste to vulnerable rural areas, Stone’s “what if” proposal that things other than human beings and corporations have legal rights was turned into a reality. Following months of neighborhood gatherings, deep discussions, weekend presentations of CELDF’s signature Democracy School, and public hearings in which trepidations and optimism were expressed in equal measure, CELDF produced an ordinance that put the interests of the community and the living world ahead of the state and industries’ economic priorities. The ordinance answered Professor Stone’s hypothetical “what if nature itself had legal standing to challenge the rampant degradation of ecosystems to the point of unviability by modern industrial society?” At the time, we celebrated what seemed a very significant departure from the legalized vandalization of nature for profit, but the legacy media made it clear it would remain an insignificant blip in the history of the law, for the sake of preserving business as usual. And then Ecuador happened. And then dozens of other communities across the United States, then Bolivia and India and Spain, and Ireland, and . . . And the rest is history in the making. Tamaqua Borough, located in eastern Pennsylvania 75 miles from New York City, has been a sacrifice zone for over 100 years. Following decades of coal mining, the former mining pits became valuable as toxic waste disposal sites in the early 2000’s. Facing corporate poisoning, local residents including Cathy Miorelli organized against a proposal to deposit hundreds of truck loads of fly ash, river dredge, and sewage sludge in the Springdale Pit bordering Tamaqua. “Our cancer clusters didn’t matter,” says Miorelli, who was voted onto the Borough Council and helped push through the rights of nature ordinance. “Our clear and united voice opposing dumping didn’t matter. What mattered was that a corporation wanted to dump in Tamaqua – regardless of what we, the people, wanted. And each way we turned for help to stop it, we faced dead ends.” Miorelli credits CELDF with providing the legal assistance and creative thinking that sparked the landmark law. ”Learning about CELDF and community rights was a game changer in our community,” she says. “We found the courage to stand up for ourselves. We realized that no one was going to protect us or the ecosystems upon which we depend except us.” CELDF, once a traditional environmental law firm working to challenge permits in the regulatory system, has been a leader in the global rights of nature movement that has emerged since 2006 and spread worldwide. Professor Stone wrote in his 1972 article that ”each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’ - those who are holding rights at the time.” Though Stone’s law review article influenced the work of CELDF and the law in Tamaqua Borough, it is important to note that indigenous people and cultures across the globe have lived and continue to live in the manner that reflects the values which rights of nature laws have attempted to codify in the western legal system, and there is evidence that rights of nature was recognized in a tribal law in 2002. Rights of nature has come a long way since 2006, but still has a long way to go to be fully realized. In April 2025, Ben Price and other rights of nature advocates from around the world were scheduled to speak at the UN, but were denied by the order of the president of the UN General Assembly. CELDF reported on this in a media release from May 2025 entitled, “A Slap in the Face” — Rights of Nature Advocates Silenced at the United Nations. To document successes, challenges, and pitfalls in rights of nature work, CELDF released the inaugural State of Rights of Nature Report in June 2026. The report, the first in what will be an annual series, highlights that “as rights of nature gains momentum around the world, it is important that advocates guard against co-optation and the pressure that powerful opponents are already putting on our movement to render it ineffective.” To track what has happened to date with the rights of nature movement, the most comprehensive collection of rights of nature laws and judicial decisions can be found at the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. Get full access to Truth and Reckoning at celdf.substack.com/subscribe
