Abstract

‘UK government can never accept idea nature has rights, delegate tells UN’ (The Guardian, 2024). And yet, at community and regional levels, we are seeing council motions to recognise river rights, a new Ecocide Bill before the Scottish Parliament, and the world’s first Well-being of Future Generations Act in Wales. New ecological approaches to law and rights are gaining momentum in the UK. How transformative are they? How might we treat our more-than-human world differently if we were to recognise nonhuman rights? What might we learn from other contexts, anthropological and critical perspectives? This seminar will ground these questions in insights from Helen’s recent research projects that have engaged with law, music and human-Earth relations in the UK and Ecuador. She argues that ecological law and rights-based approaches hold potential for transforming systems of law and governance, but that legal change must always be sensitive to context, existing legal and cultural practices, and the local knowledges and perspectives that shape relationships between people and place.