Mr. Thomas Lizney:

I wish to reaffirm that the first rights of nature law passed in the US is now 17 years old. The constitutional amendment adopted in Ecuador by more than 60% of the popular vote is now 15 years old. The seminal cases in Ecuador that have been filed and won in front of the constitutional court, which is the highest court examining constitutional issues in the country of Ecuador, were mostly brought by NGOs. These are organisations seeking to stop permit issuances. This is where the law has been most effective at this point.

Just a couple months ago in the United States of America we had our first successful rights of nature case brought by a tribal government in the US with a population of salmon as the plaintiff. In these cases humans are not the plaintiffs: rivers are plaintiffs and salmon populations are plaintiffs, for example. This is what the law provides so we eliminate that kind of limitation on standing for humans and expand it through the use of ecosystems as plaintiffs. Just recently the city of Seattle was forced to settle and provide for fish passage around hydroelectric dams on a main river through the state of Washington to provide for spawning activity for salmon. Essentially, the settlement held that salmon had a right to spawn. This kind of development of case law is important from a constitutional perspective to put those constitutional standards in, not just for an abstract reason but for very practical reasons about constantly evolving - just like other constitutional standards dealing with human rights - those standards to allow for that jurisprudence to occur. Those are just a sampling of some of the cases that have happened around the rights of nature.