After five hours in the desert, we were getting low on water. Plants were drooping under the heat of the midday sun, conserving what water they had soaked up during last night’s rain. Small pools of warm water could be found evaporating in the dips of boulders, enough to scoop into a Nalgene and filter into bottles. The trail led us through a drying creek, banks lined with the tracks of deer that, like us, were looking for water. The phrase “water is life” had never felt so relevant.
This was Utah in the summer, a three-hours’ drive from Earth Law Center (ELC) in Durango, Colorado where I interned for the past three months. The Ute and Navajo are the people of Southern Colorado and Eastern Utah. The desert canyons are lined with petroglyphs, preserving two thousand years of human history on the land.
In both cultures, tradition holds that many natural features and animals are embodiments of spirits and ancestors. The land is central to cultural heritage and knowledge. Respect and reciprocity are vital: the understanding that human well-being depends on the health and balance of the environment just as environmental well-being depends on the respect and sustainable practices of humanity. Establishing “rights” and “human rights”—that is to say any system of normative rules or principles of freedom and distribution—cannot be separated from the natural world.
ELC works to bring this knowledge to the mainstream and enshrine it in law. It advances ecocentric laws that respect and protect the natural world. The organization emphasizes a harmonious relationship between humans and nature, advocating for legal frameworks that address climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem degradation. As Earth law practitioners often reiterate, humans are part of nature; this truth became glaringly obvious in the desert where every being relies on natural cycles from one hour to the next.
This is true more generally, as well. We rely entirely on the natural world for every resource essential to our survival. This fundamental dependence has prompted human rights frameworks to increasingly recognize the right to a healthy environment. However, Earth lawyers argue that this anthropocentric approach is flawed, often failing to safeguard the environment from competing human interests. Like all rights, environmental rights can be compromised in the name of projects that serve other human goals. ELC’s ecocentric perspective calls for a paradigm shift, advocating for the recognition of rights for all aspects of nature—including humans. These rights should not be overridden by human interests but must be respected in their own right.
The Earth Law Center also strives to integrate environmental and human rights laws to foster a sustainable and equitable future. The organization seeks to address the unequal distribution of environmental harms by working with those most affected by climate change and pollution. One notable example is the Marañón River in Peru, which was granted personhood under the law with the Kukama Indigenous women of Santa Rita de Castilla serving as its legal guardians. This innovative approach exemplifies the merging of environmental protection with human rights, ensuring that both nature and human communities are safeguarded and valued.
In the wilderness of Utah and Colorado, the interconnection between human well-being and the natural world is undeniable. From the water that sustains both us and the desert creatures to the profound peace found in the silence of a mountain summit, it is evident that human well-being is intricately tied to the health of our environment. In the curated green spaces of city parks and at the desks in homes and libraries where we work, it is too easy to lose sight of just how integrated and interdependent we really are, how impossible human rights are without nature’s rights and how fruitless it has been to separate them. In Durango and in Utah, it was impossible to forget.