The Ancient Roots of ‘Nature Rights’ and Riverkeepers

Commentary

God’s first instructions to mankind appear in the opening chapters of Genesis. After creating humanity in his image, “God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Immediately thereafter, Scripture records the complementary charge of stewardship: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” These dual mandates—to multiply and fill the earth, and to cultivate and guard the creation entrusted to human care—have shaped Western conceptions of dominion, property, and responsibility toward the natural world for millennia.

Wesley J. Smith’s recent editorial “Nature Rights’ Hits the Big Time” warns against the “nature rights” movement. He says the movement seeks to grant enforceable legal personhood to rivers, trees, glaciers, and ecosystems so they may sue (through human guardians) to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.” That movement is indeed often vague, and sometimes characterized as being at odds with human flourishing. But the choice is not binary. Unchecked pollution is also not human flourishing, and humans do have agency to protect their environment. There is a responsible path. In addition to the Lord’s admonitions in Genesis, there is hard science that shows that short-term economic gains for unchecked industries are often dwarfed by the long-term economic gains from not severely polluting the environment. When species become extinct, when water becomes undrinkable, and when the landscape is scarred, human beings lose out, in addition to the obvious destruction of flora and fauna. Pollution is really a sneaky tax on the population.

Smith errs when he treats the Riverkeeper model of waterway protection as something novel. The legal concepts underlying Riverkeepers are not new; they are centuries-old applications of common-law private property rights and private enforcement, migrated from England to America at the founding and refined in early U.S. jurisprudence.

English law long recognized private “riverkeepers” or “water bailiffs” who guarded proprietary fisheries and trout streams against poachers and pollution. These were not untethered agents of “nature” as a rights-bearing entity. They enforced the exclusive rights of landowners and fishing proprietors and arguably the public interest. When the American colonies and the new United States received the English common law, those principles traveled with it. By the early 19th century, American courts and treatises had firmly established that riparian owners on non-navigable streams held the soil to the middle thread of the stream and the right to use the water “as it was wont to run,” subject to the equal rights of other proprietors and the maxim sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas (“use your property in such a way that you do not injure that of another”).

Justice Joseph Story’s opinion in Tyler v. Wilkinson (1827) is a classic statement of this doctrine. Joseph K. Angell’s 1824 treatise systematically cataloged the private remedies available to owners of water privileges against diversion, obstruction, and other interference. These were human rights of property and use, enforceable by private suit—not a claim that the river itself possessed standing.

The modern Riverkeeper organizations, beginning with the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association in the 1960s, adapted this tradition. Founder Robert H. Boyle explicitly drew on the British riverkeeper model. The groups patrol waterways, document discharges, and bring citizen suits under statutes such as the Clean Water Act’s Section 1365. They act as private attorneys general. Crucially, Article III still requires a concrete, particularized injury to a human plaintiff or organizational member. Aesthetic, recreational, or commercial harm to people who use the water can suffice; the waterway itself is never the plaintiff. This is continuous with the common-law private-enforcement tradition, not a break from it.

By contrast, true “rights of nature” ordinances—such as Toledo’s Lake Erie Bill of Rights—attempt to vest independent legal personhood in the ecosystem and authorize suits in its name. Federal courts have struck such measures down as unconstitutionally vague and beyond municipal power. Equating the two frameworks obscures the distinction. One is an old common-law mechanism by which humans protect their own interests in resources. The other is a recent philosophical experiment that treats nature as a rights-bearing subject co-equal with persons.

Stewardship of the kind commanded in Genesis does not require demoting humans to the status of just another animal or granting rivers the right to sue. It has long been pursued through private property, nuisance law, and statutory citizen enforcement that keep humans as the rights-holders and decision-makers. The Riverkeeper concept was well established for centuries before the modern environmental movement. Treating it as a novel threat confuses traditional legal tools for protecting human use and enjoyment of waterways and the environment with the far more radical project of personifying nature itself.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.