The push to grant legal rights to nature is gaining momentum

The movement to give trees, rivers and ecosystems the legal right to exist, thrive and regenerate has been bubbling under for decades, but it has just scored a very welcome win, says Graham Lawton

By Graham Lawton

I AM writing this from New York City, where New Scientist recently opened an office. I am an urban creature so I feel at home here, but green space is thin on the ground. There is Central Park but, unlike London, there are very few small patches of nature to offer respite from the pace of life in the epicentre of late-stage capitalism.

It is a little ironic, then, that New York is also one of the epicentres of a movement that could do much to challenge the hegemony of 21st-century corporations. Just up the road from here, lawyers …