Our right is not able to face the destruction of the living, says the lawyer Marine Calmet, who returns, in an interview with the “world”, on natural entities – river or park – recognized as a personality Legal.
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Marine Calmet, a lawyer by training, campaigned, in French Guiana, against the mining project of the Golden Mountain, abandoned in 2019, before creating the NGO Wild Legal, a school and an incubator to defend rights of nature. She prefaced the reissue of Christopher Stone’s book, should the trees be able to plead? (The clandestine passenger, 192 pages, 15 euros).
The movement of the rights of nature arouses growing interest. How to explain it?
Our current law is not able to deal with the destruction of the living and the climate crisis. On the contrary, it gives a blanc-check to many polluting projects. Many of our laws have been written in ministries where industrial lobbies are better represented than rivers or forests. Our mining code, for example, was written to facilitate and develop the exploitation of basements, without taking into account the protection of the environment. Faced with this observation, the movement of the rights of nature reminds us that we must respect the laws based on the functioning of the living, much more vital than the dogmas of growth if we want our territories to remain habitable.
How was the idea of recognizing nature as a subject of law?
The American Christopher Stone was the first lawyer, in 1972, to have defended this idea and demonstrated feasibility of it, as part of a case opposing the association for the defense of the Sierra Club environment and Disney , who wanted to build a leisure park in a valley housing majestic sequoias, the King Valley mineral. Sierra Club challenged the destruction of trees, but was dismissed by justice, which considered that the association was not legitimate, failing to defend its own interests.
Faced with this restrictive reading of the right to act, which makes legal action impossible in the name of nature, Stone proposed to give a legal personality to natural entities, thus opening new fields of reflection, legal, but also psychosocial and philosophical. He was convinced that an evolution of law could have an impact on Western culture and correct our dominating vision of nature.
fifty years later, how these rights of nature are implemented ?
Two models develop, on the one hand, the general recognition of rights to the whole of nature, and, on the other, a protection which is organized on the scale of ecosystems. The most successful example is undoubtedly that of the Ecuador where citizens have spoken out by referendum in favor of the rights of the Pachamama (the Mother Earth), within the framework of the Constitution adopted in 2008. The consequences are real, And many case law has since been referred to it to limit industrial policies. Recently a judge refused to issue permits for the establishment of two mines in a park, on the grounds that mining activity is not compatible with the fundamental rights of the park and the species that live there.
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