Wild Law

On thin ice: Could 'wild laws' protecting all the Earth's community - including animals, plants, rivers and ecosystems - save our natural world?

One of the first was introduced in September, when a community of about 7,000 people in Pennsylvania, in the US, adopted what is called Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance, 2006.

It was hardly an event to set the world alight, except for two things: it refuses to recognise corporations' rights to apply sewage sludge to land, but it recognises natural communities and ecosystems within the borough as "legal persons" for the purposes of enforcing civil rights.

This just crossed my plate recently and I find it simply astonishing. Douglas and Blackmun broached the idea in their Sierra Club v. Morton dissents, suggesting that forests could have rights (which really translates to standing to sue).

The first question I asked upon reading this was whether the community actually had the right to do this (grant rights -- standing to sue) via passing an ordinance.

Different states grant different rights to their municipalities, so it's possible that depending on what state you're in, a town might not have sufficient power. Massachusetts, for example, is a "Home Rule" state -- towns and cities have a lot of legislative power, and can pass ordinances and bylaws that create, say, wetlands protection restrictions on development that are even more stringent than the state or federal version of the same. Home Rule states are not common, though.

Generally, when you pass a statute (or, in this case, bylaw or ordinance) you can grant standing to categories of people to sue. Defining an ecosystem as "person" for the purposes of a given ordinance seems to fall within the framework of that power.

This opens the door to a lot of fighting about who has the legal right to represent that ecosystem, since it still can't represent. That came up in the Morton case, b/c the Sierra Club was trying to represent that ecosystem.

It should be very interesting watching this Pennsylvania ordinance shake things up.

Comments?