Rights of nature
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 1 January 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In July 2019 Bangladesh took the unusual step of granting all its rivers “legal personhood”. It was the result of a long fight by environmental campaigners, alarmed by the damage done to the country’s vital river system by pollution and the effects of climate change. But does passing a law recognising that nature has rights, just as humans do, automatically guarantee its protection? According to its supporters, the movement for the Rights of Nature is an expanding area of law, but are those laws anything more than just symbolic? We talk to Dr Mohammad Abdul Matin by the banks of the Buriganga River in Dhaka about the future for the country’s rivers and in New Zealand to Chris Finlayson, who was attorney general in the centre right government that in 2017 passed a law recognising the Whanganui River as a living entity. And Cardiff University law professor, Anna Grear, tells us why giving natural phenomena the same legal status as humans is no safeguard against exploitation. Join Tamasin Ford on the foreshore of the River Thames to find out more about the rights of nature.
(Photo: Fisherman throwing his net into the Buriganga River, Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamasin Ford. Welcome to Business Daily. |
| 0:10.0 | That's the sound of the River Thames in front of me. I'm here on the beach in Greenwich watching the water lapping the shore. |
| 0:18.4 | This is the spot where the river sweeps out of the city of London |
| 0:22.2 | round the Isle of Dogs towards the sea. |
| 0:25.8 | Dear River Tens, you keep moving along. |
| 0:33.7 | Not knowing where you're going or where you've come from. |
| 0:40.8 | Old Father Thames, as it's fondly known, has brought life to London since time began. |
| 0:46.4 | It's been lovingly celebrated in poetry, works of art and music. |
| 0:53.5 | Stay a while. stay a while, |
| 0:55.0 | stay a while, listen to me. |
| 1:04.0 | But what if Papa Thames wasn't just anthropomorphised in poetry and song? |
| 1:10.0 | What if it was classed as a person in the eyes of the law? wasn't just anthropomorphized in poetry and song. |
| 1:14.2 | What if it was classed as a person in the eyes of the law? |
| 1:17.9 | Would that protect it from the damage done by humans? |
| 1:23.9 | Today, we are exploring the growing movement for the rights of nature. |
| 1:32.9 | What we have seen is this incredibly accelerating level of human understanding about what we have done and the need for change. And I think the rights of nature is this new expanding area of |
| 1:37.7 | law which represents human beings saying we need to shift how we live on this planet, how we |
| 1:43.7 | govern ourselves toward nature. |
| 1:46.5 | But does giving nature rights actually protect it? Human rights were recognised more than 70 years ago, |
| 1:53.9 | but people continue to be exploited and persecuted to this day. Why would this be any different for nature? |
| 2:02.3 | In a capitalist system, with a very strong basis in the fossil fuel economy, |
| 2:09.1 | giving rights to nature does not necessarily effectively protect natural entities |
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