César Rodríguez-Garavito
Legal practitioners are watching a little-known provision within Ecuador’s emerging Ecological Guardianship Ordinance, which allows municipalities to appoint ecological guardians with standing in planning decisions. It sounds administrative. In practice, it could become one of the most effective mechanisms for translating Rights of Nature into everyday governance.
Rights of Nature depends on a cultural shift from seeing nature as object to seeing it as participant. A recent collaboration involving Merlin Sheldrake explores fungal communication through sound. This tests how non-human systems can become legible to humans.
A growing body of legal scholarship is shifting attention from recognition towards responsibility. Once nature is recognised, who takes responsibility for maintaining relationships over time? Across legal and governance circles, stewardship is quietly becoming one of the most important questions in the field.
Taken together, these point towards a new phase in the evolution of Rights of Nature. The question is no longer only whether nature can have rights, but how human institutions learn to relate to entities they don’t own.