The Ruse and Reach of (Nature's) Rights

The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement is often celebrated as a promising rupture fromanthropocentric and extractive legal norms. Yet much RoN discourse assumes that rights areinherently emancipatory. This article challenges that assumption by tracing the long andparadoxical history of rights as epistemic technologies that both consolidate and contest power.Rights emerged alongside enclosure and colonization, long defining who counts as a legalsubject. At the same time, they have been strategically reclaimed by the subjugated andmarginalized in moments of rupture as instruments of survival and material advancement.Beginning with divergent case studies from Ecuador, the United States, and Aotearoa NewZealand, this paper places these RoN efforts in dialogue with critical histories and contemporarydebates around rights. Rather than asking whether nature can hold rights, it interrogates whetherrights themselves can reasonably engender liberatory multi-species politics without reinscribingthe very legal orders they aim to transcend.