Across the world, a movement variously called the Rights of Nature, Earth Jurisprudence, or Ecological Law is gaining momentum. It seeks to extend legal standing to rivers, forests, and ecosystems. Its advocates argue that its widespread adoption would allow the guardians of nature to bring legal action or receive damages for harm. It is an attempt to halt and reverse the destruction of natural habitats that is being driven by obdurate economic systems and avaricious commercial interests.

Providing legal personhood in law for the purpose of establishing rights is not, merely a publicity stunt or woke legal innovation. It is already in place for businesses and corporations. In many legal systems, particularly in common law jurisdictions like the United States, United Kingdom, and India, businesses and corporations have long been recognised as artificial legal persons (or “juridical persons”). This means they are treated as separate legal entities from their shareholders, directors, or employees. Because corporations have a separate identity from their organisers and investors, the institutions themselves can own property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued, and exist in perpetuity.

In his book “Is a River Alive?”, Robert MacFarlane describes how various countries have enacted laws that grant nature, particularly rivers and ecosystems, legal rights or personhood. He describes how Ecuador was the first nation in the world (in 2008) to constitutionalise the “Rights of Nature”, specifically covering the Rio Los Cedros Andean Cloud Forest to protect it from mining. The Whanganui River in New Zealand now has legal personhood and the Ganges and Yamuna rivers were briefly granted it by an Indian high court before the Supreme Court reversed the decision. The Colorado River Ecosystem was also the subject of a legal rights petition filed in 2017.

In the UK, a community group ‘Friends of the Cam’ has declared that the river Cam has fundamental rights and has established the River Cam ‘Rights of Rivers Charter’. These rights were formally declared on June 21, 2021, and are re-affirmed annually. The declaration covers the river and its tributaries and includes the right to flow, to be free from pollution, to be fed by sustainable aquifers, to maintain native biodiversity, and to be restored. It is a community-led initiative aimed at protecting the river as a living entity. Similar campaigns are in place now for other UK rivers such as the River Ouse. However, while many groups including Friends of the Cam have declared these rights, they are not yet currently legally binding under UK law.

The consciousness and subjectivity of nature may be so radically different in kind from that of humans as to be existentially untranslatable, and virtually unimaginable in purely human terms. Yet many environmentalists argue that nature does not just function ‘as if’ it had personhood, but it can actually demonstrate most of the essential characteristics. In their natural state and in the absence of human intervention rivers for example are able to evince their own homeostasis, organisation, metabolism, growth, adaption , response to stimuli and reproduction; they have the ability to initiate movement independent of external control (autonomy) , the capacity to feel, perceive and communicate distress and to  have a memory of for instance, previous riverbeds.

In western culture, many poets have been able to intuit aspects of this invisible agency of nature’s governance, describing how simultaneously both metaphorically and practically, nature is not just like something alive-but that it actually is.

Seamus Heaney’s bog poems perceive something ancient and sacred in Irish landscape that resists a purely rationalist or materialist description. Ted Hughes, in River, writes as though the river itself is the subject and humanity its guest. Patrick Kavanagh found the holy in the parish ditch. The Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas sensed that behind every bleak hill there was an absence that was itself a presence. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” and that divine life animates all created things; an idea that all of nature is alive with a sacred presence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that in nature, “everything is in connection with something else,” suggesting an organic, living unity throughout the natural world. These poets are not pantheists, but they do see all of nature as both alive in the material world and ensouled in the spiritual. The implication is that nature is not simply an inert resource or an incidental backdrop to human life, but something constituted by order and meaning, and for this reason it has a claim of equal presence with humanity.

Such understandings of nature are central to many if not most, indigenous people’s knowledge, beliefs and tradition; understood and taught through countless pre-Christian generations to the present day. Yet Christianity too may have something of a surprising but long-neglected theology relevant to these renewed ways of seeing nature. This theology provides understandings of both metaphysics: the philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, and of ontology: the study of being and existence; specifically, how entities are categorised, and what it means for something to ‘be’.

Viewing all of nature as alive, ensouled and governanced by agencies we can only obliquely observe, may constitute the recovery of an older catholic theology of the created order..

Thomas Aquinas, (b.1225), was an Italian Dominican Friar and priest known as the ‘Angelic Doctor’. He is considered one of the most influential theologians and philosophers in western history. In his ‘Summa Theologiae’ he drew on the neo platonic inheritance mediated through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and articulated a vision of all of the created world as a vast hierarchy of being, animated at every level by intelligences both visible and invisible. This language Aquinas inherits from St. Paul – thronoi, kyriotetes, archai, exousiai, translated in most Bibles as thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, names something that first-century Christians and medieval scholastics absolutely understood as real.

For Aquinas, nature and the cosmos were not simply matter in motion, they were explicitly governed. Every sphere of natural existence was overseen by specific angelic powers whose task it was to mediate divine providence toward created things. These were the governing spirits of places; they were the structural forces that organised reality; the ordering principles embedded in institutions, nations, laws, and one might now argue, ecosystems. Creation had a governance structure, that was not merely of human projection or figurative language, and the angelic powers were not simply seen as metaphors. They were more properly explained as ‘metaphysical realities’ embedded in the structure of creation. Using both old and New Testament scripture, he delineated the ‘nine choirs of angels’, a traditional classification of angelic beings engaged in this governance as Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

Amongst these, the Powers are regarded as “warrior angels” who maintain cosmic order. Their primary task is to defend Gods creation from hostile forces and repel demonic agents. They manage combat and lead spiritual defence against chaos. Principalities are considered the protectors and guardians of nations, cities, states and the church. They oversee large groups of people and guide human history according to Gods will.

In the Thomistic imagination, the angelic order was always already political. Power was distributed through a hierarchy, and every level of that hierarchy had its proper dignity and its proper accountability before God. The powers and principalities were created as good but could be corrupted by pride which most often engendered a will to dominate; and from that fallen state, a kind of institutional malevolence could arise.

St Paul warned in Ephesians 6:12 how these angelic forces, when fallen, can exert a very significant and unholy influence on the wider social systems and structures by which we live our lives. He says: “for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities , against the powers, against the world rulers of the present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”

Catholic theology has curiously underutilised this historic Thomistic theology of the Powers and Principalities in its engagement with the governance of creation. One consequence is that the Christian duty to ‘engage the Powers’ has been often neglected. This risks an atrophied view of the unholy; one that focusses principally on privatised and personal failings but sometimes discounts the wicked in collective, social, cultural, institutional or structural domains.

Aquinas’ theology was taken further by Walter Wink, a Methodist biblical scholar who spent three decades elaborating what he called the “Powers” in a trilogy of books, Naming the Powers (1984), Unmasking the Powers (1986), and Engaging the Powers (1992). As with Aquinas, he saw the Powers and Principalities as simultaneously both present in the material world and a metaphysical reality with a spiritual presence. He saw them as not purely supernatural entities hovering above the material world, but as the inner spiritual dimension of every outer institution and system. Every nation, every corporation, every bureaucracy, every natural order has each what Wink called an “interiority,” a spiritual identity that can be corrupted or redeemed. Wink saw the New Testament’s spiritual language not as a primitive mythology but as a sophisticated attempt to name something real in its totality; a gestalt which must be reckoned with.

He argued that many of the Powers that were producing harm in the world were not inherently evil, but that they were fallen. They were created good, as mediating structures of divine order, but they had become idolatrous – claiming for themselves an absolute sovereignty that belongs only to God.

In our current time, the fallen Powers that are currently despoiling nature, rivers and ecosystems are sadly not difficult to identify. They exist in plain sight. They include mining and logging conglomerates, industrialised chemical manufacturers, privatised water and energy companies, agro-chemical food and farming systems, inept regulatory bodies, and inadequate or absent legislative frameworks often a feature of failing nations. This list is not exhaustive. Such Powers ignore, profane or effectively wage war on the principalities of natural systems as created by God.

To pollute or dam a river is to assault a Principality, to commit in some genuine sense, a spiritual act of violence against a structure of creation. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest, the death of the Aral Sea, the slow poisoning of the Mississippi delta are all ecological crises; but they are also spiritual and corporeal acts of violence. They create moral and material injury to human life and to all of the natural world. They are a desecration of altars we had not quite recognised and are failing to defend. 

Our inaction has resulted in rivers and other ecosystems that are rapidly running out of time for us to develop an adequate theology of their suffering or to plan for their defence. They are already dying and so we must act with urgency.

Catholic tradition already knows how to do this. Canon law, natural law reasoning, the whole architecture of Catholic jurisprudence, is premised on the idea that law participates in a higher order of reality. To argue that nature or a river possesses rights is not, on this account, an innovation. It is a recovery of the Thomistic insight that every level of creation has its proper dignity, its own mode of participation in the divine life, and because of that dignity, it generates claims. Such claims are registered in the structure of reality itself, claims that human earthly law either honours or violates; claims that Christians as guardians of nature, must urgently voice.

So, what more might the Catholic church do? Might Catholic Cannon Lawyers offer their spiritual, judicial and advocacy skills to support the wider ‘rights of nature’ movement? Could each Catholic diocese audit and then ‘name the Powers’ by explaining how unjust and unholy social and economic systems are despoiling the local rivers that flow through their boundaries, explicitly illustrating how their power is being abused in the destruction of creation? In doing so they would ‘unmask the powers’, reveal their invisible “inner spirit” and make visible the social and economic dynamics that allow them to dominate both nature and communities. The consequence could be that they wrestle them back to their original God given purpose through prayer, advocacy and political intervention. In doing so they may redeem them.

Pope Francis’ landmark encyclical Laudato Si’ moved the environmental conversation forward in the Catholic Church very significantly, but its reception in church hierarchy and culture remains marginalised in many places. It is cited in homilies and at events but is rarely integrated into anything that resembles structural action at the level of social and legal governance systems. Yet, if corporations, legal systems, and market structures have spiritual interiors that can be named, confronted, and called to account, then the Catholic activist working to secure legal personhood for a river is not just engaged in secular environmental politics; they are perhaps also engaged in spiritual warfare of the most classical kind.

Dominic Harrison