Mr. Thomas Lizney:

We are here because of the failure of existing environmental law to recognise nature as anything other than a property or a thing. In the United States our experience is that we have a choice. We can try to make the existing system work, even though it comes from a bad model. This means setting up specialised environmental courts, resourcing a system and having adequate and robust compliance measures, all of which we have done in the United States.

It has not worked. That is the case because it comes from bad model. That bad model is that the regulation of property has become the environmental law movement. Getting away from that means recognising nature not just as a thing or as property, but as something animated in the law. That requires a constitutional amendment. In a nutshell, what constitutional amendments on the rights of nature in other places, as well as the three dozen laws which we have litigated in the US, have done is to empower the most aggressive environmental defenders to protect the environment with a recognition of the built-in constraints or restraints on state enforcement, while attempting to enlarge and expand the number of environmental defenders.