Rights of Nature for Wisconsin Watersheds

Establishing legal rights for Wisconsin’s cherished streams, rivers & watershed ecosystems is the only means to afford them protections into the future.

• Following in the footsteps of successful rights-based movements, like gay rights, emancipation and women’s suffrage, comes a movement to legally recognize the inherent rights of nature.
• A nature’s rights paradigm treats ecosystems as entities, empowering them to prohibit exploitation, unlike our current legal system which treats nature as property, enacting laws merely to regulate exploitation.
• Reverence for the commons has been practiced by indigenous peoples for millennia; protecting nature’s rights resonates with indigenous peoples and sees them on the front lines of the movement.
• Emboldened by calls from local communities and indigenous groups alike, governments and judiciaries worldwide are starting to integrate rights of nature language into their fundamental legal structures.

Join the movement to recognize fundamental rights of nature for Wisconsin’s Rivers and the greater Great Lakes Watershed! A global movement to acknowledge the rights of nature in courts of law is gaining momentum. In the US, numerous communities are incorporating rights of nature language into local ordinances, enacting new community bills of rights, and amending current articles of governance to protect their lifegiving ecosystems and wrest power from corporations by acknowledging that nature, in all its lifeforms, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles.