In stories like “Rip Van Winkle,” writer Washington Irving coined the phrase “the lordly Hudson” to describe the river’s majestic flow. Along with writers and poets, Indigenous peoples have traditionally seen human-like or supernatural characteristics in rivers, mountains, or the earth itself to properly understand our relationship to the natural world.
There is now an international-movement-turned-legal-framework, the Rights of Nature, that takes a similar approach by asserting that our natural surroundings have an inherent right to exist and thrive, just as humans do. Such rights are being cast as the yin to the yang of corporate personhood laws, since corporations are often responsible for causing catastrophic environmental harms such as General Electric’s infamous dumping of PCBs in the Hudson for 30 years.
Locally, the Rights of Nature movement was recently taken up in the cradle of the modern environmental movement — the Hudson Valley — in a March 2024 webinar from the Hudson-focused conservation group Riverkeeper. One of the movement’s major international proponents, senior legal counsel Thomas Linzey of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, participated, as did Indigenous leaders from the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Nation, whose ancestral homelands lay in the Hudson Valley.
Linzey introduced the Rights of Nature as “the recognition, by legislation or by court-made law, of the legally enforceable rights of nature as a whole, or a species and ecosystems.” Moving beyond regulations and permits to a rights-based status, he added, “Rights of Nature is basically seen as an attempt to augment and strengthen existing environmental laws by heightening the types of protections afforded to nature.”
In 2006, Linzey drafted what’s been seen as the world’s first Rights of Nature law, which banned the dumping of toxic sewage in Tamaqua, Penn. Two years later, Linzey also worked on the first nationwide Rights of Nature law in Ecuador, where it is now written into the country’s constitution. In the years since, dozens of Rights of Nature laws have been passed at the local level in the U.S. and at the national and local levels in other countries.
With those precedents in mind, some Hudson Valley residents have recently explored ways that the Rights of Nature framework could be used to protect the Hudson River and possibly expedite restoration of past harms to its watershed, which still today make many of the Hudson’s fish too toxic to eat.
After community members in Connelly, N.Y., formed Eco-Assembly New York to support protections for the Hudson River, they brought their cause to Phil Erner, who was then a legislator in Ulster County. “Basically, these neighbors were concerned about both the river as a resource for themselves, and also the river for its own sake,” Erner says, noting that they felt federal and state protections weren’t doing enough. “So the hope was that we could enact something to at least protect the part of the river that we can protect in Ulster County, and the Rights of Nature seemed like a promising avenue because it had been explored in other states and other countries,” he said. “It seemed to be a movement that was gaining some traction.”
Working with Eco-Assembly and others in the community, Erner drafted and sponsored Local Law No. 12 of 2022, which called for rights to clean water and a healthy river ecosystem for both Ulster County residents and the river itself. By December 2023, however, the proposed law failed to gain the support it needed to move forward, and Erner’s term in the county legislature ended shortly thereafter.
Yet a similar effort was also underway at the same time in Kingston. Members of the Ramapo Munsee Lenape Nation passed a resolution in their own community for the Rights of Nature. “We see ourselves, as Indigenous people, as reflected in the environment and the environment as reflected in us,” Ramapo Munsee Nation member Owl Smith explained in the Riverkeeper webinar. This, he said, stands in stark contrast to how most industrialized nations view the natural world as property, or as being an entity separate from human life.
Building on this idea, the Ramapo Munsee people worked on drafting a Rights of Nature resolution for Kingston with Julie Noble, the city’s sustainability coordinator. This effort became Kingston’s Memorializing Resolution #98 of 2023, which calls for a “Bill of Rights” for the Hudson River, and it passed unanimously that year. But unlike a law, a memorializing resolution is not legal binding and stands only as an expression of intent for the city government to move forward with further action.
Noble says although it is still unclear what that action will be, this was a positive step forward for the city that aligns with its sustainability goals. “Even though it is only a memorializing resolution, I think it sends a good statement from both branches of legislation — the common council and the mayor’s office — that this is important to us,” she says. The resolution could also serve as a replicable template that other cities could adopt, Noble adds.
These kinds of early grassroots efforts have been an important part of eventually establishing Rights of Nature laws in places like Ecuador, according to Riverkeeper president Tracy Brown. “Building it at the community level, like we’re hearing about the work happening in Kingston and Ulster County, is a great approach to introducing the idea and getting people to understand it more, and lay the groundwork for eventually doing something statewide, and possibly nationwide,” she says.
And so metaphorically, the different starting points of the Rights of Nature movement in the Hudson Valley are following the same path as the river they intend to protect. Because like any great river, “the lordly Hudson” can be traced back to a confluence of many tributaries along its path that all begin with a trickle somewhere upstream.
