“Wild Law: the New Jurisprudence”
http://www.wildethics.org/essays/wild-law.html

Excerpts:

“Wild Law, the acknowledgement in law and governance that nature and all its elements have rights, is a concept whose time has come, and you’ll likely be hearing more about it from now on. Remember how suddenly the Iron Curtain came down, despite how solidly it had been in place for almost 50 years? And remember how the entrenched apartheid system in South Africa ended so abruptly? Many people struggled for decades, but when the world was finally ready for a paradigm shift, it happened quickly.

With global warming waking up even those previously in deep denial about the dire state of the environment, the embrace of wild law may be the next paradigm shift.”

…

“Wild law recognizes the rights of rivers to flow unimpeded, the rights of mountains to remain intact instead of having their tops blown off for coal mining, the rights of old growth forests to remain unlogged, and the rights of all humans, animals, birds, insects amphibians and other beings to a habitat that supports their existence. Wild law requires that decisions made by communities, governing bodies, courts or other social or cultural authority adhere to, rather than violate, these rights. Wild Law does not place humans above other members of the “Earth Community,” as visionary Thomas Berry puts it. It is ecocentric (Earth-centered) rather than anthropocentric (human-centered). If we make the paradigm shift, we will enter what Berry calls the “Ecozoic Era,” taking our rightful place in the Earth Community instead of attempting to rule it.”