The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement (film)

Directed by Issac Goeckeritz, María Valeria Berros, and Hal Crimmel. 2018. 

This film, shot in Ecuador, New Zealand, and the United States, explores how the legal system in the industrialized world tends to view nature as a resource from which wealth is extracted, a commodity whose only value is to provide for human needs. Yet indigenous communities have viewed themselves as part of nature, and as pressures on ecosystems mount and as conventional laws seem increasingly inadequate to address environmental degradation, communities, cities, regions, and countries around the world are turning to a new legal strategy known as The Rights of Nature. The film explores the more recent origins of this legal concept, and its application and implementation around the world, where personhood status has been granted to rivers, lakes, forests, and mountains.

Watch the film for free: in English or in Spanish (Los Derechos de la Naturaleza. Un Movimiento Global).