The prospect of a referendum on whether rights to nature should be incorporated into Ireland’s constitution, Bunreach na Heirian, has moved a step closer with the publication of a report by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action. If the next Irish Government honors its mandate to respect nature and our island home as living agents of our history, we will continue to support the movement for environmental justice and belated efforts at decolonization on the island. Two major movements will be brought together.
Rights of Nature is a legal and constitutional system that recognizes that nature (or ecosystems and features such as rivers and mountains) has an essential and unquestionable right to exist and thrive. refers to an action. Ecuador and Bolivia are famous examples of countries that have already enshrined the rights of nature in their constitutions. Earlier this year, in a landmark case in Ecuador, the country’s highest court ruled that plans to extract copper and gold from mines in protected cloud forests are unconstitutional and violate natural rights.
An interesting feature of the natural rights movement here is the leading role played by activists and academics from the northern and border counties. Local activists opposed to plans for gold mining in Sperrins and Donegal are leading the way in a pioneering campaign through Derry City, Strabane District Council and Donegal County Council.
These local efforts, in partnership with global civil society, formed the backdrop for the successful effort to include recommendations for a constitutional referendum in the Irish Citizens’ Conference on Biodiversity Loss (2022) report earlier this year. This recommendation has now been approved by the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Environment and Climate Action (December 2023), which has accepted the Citizens’ Assembly’s recommendations in principle.
A successful referendum campaign would lead to the recognition that our natural island is made up of a ‘community of subjects’, both human and ‘more-than-human’ people, and would lead to the decolonization of the Irish nation. This will be an important moment in our progress towards this goal. The idea that nature and its ecosystems do not deserve protection for their inherent rights to exist and thrive in any form is alien and has its roots in settler colonial land theft and It can be traced back to European colonial philosophy that authorized the twin crimes of ecocide and genocide. Only the gloomy philosophical and economic imagination of modern Europeans convinced them that nature is dead and to be taken away.
Indigenous peoples and colonized peoples around the world have thought and acted differently. Their culture, spirituality and language reflect a very different sensibility and ‘way of being in the world’, based on the understanding that we are relatives of other communities of mountains, rivers and wildlife. Pope Francis reiterates this idea in his Encyclical Laudao Si.
Our understanding of this very ancient entity is deeply relational. In other words, nothing exists without relationships and deep respect and consideration for the other person. In Ireland, indigenous languages and myths are a similar repository of wisdom. Consider, for example, the mythological and ecological resonance of the story of the Fomorian versus the Tuatha de Danaan. This story is a contemporary call to balance competing social trends that subjugate nature to our will or to its sovereignty.
The restoration of respect for the rights of nature, the recognition of its sovereignty as a subject of law and of our history, moves towards an indigenous political ecology, an act of liberation for both nature and ourselves. It could signal a marked change in our island journey. We look forward to voting ‘yes’ in a referendum that will give a voice to our island and Bunreach na Heirian’s oldest relatives and widen our understanding of our community.
:: Dr Peter Dolan is a lecturer in law at Queen’s University and a founding member of the campaign group Environmental Justice Network Ireland.