ABSTRACT
Political and legal activism for the rights of natural resources and their ecosystems is gaining traction in Australasia. New Zealand now has legislation recognising a river and a forest park as legal persons, with further developments underway. The rights of a Victorian river is now recognised by legislation, and activism continues for the rights of other river, forest and marine ecosystems, sometimes driven by Indigenous peoples. These developments are attempts to challenge environmental legal and policy frameworks, which are considered inadequate to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene. They may also reflect alternative values and traditions with respect to nature, including the plural law-making and decision-making capacity of Indigenous peoples and/or local communities. In this chapter, I explore the cases in which natural resources have been recognised as having legal rights or personhood in New Zealand and Australia, and consider their significance for environmental law’s response to the Anthropocene. I argue that the most significant contribution the Australasian cases make to environmental law’s response to the Anthropocene lies in their ‘relational’ function – of supporting connections between peoples and place via local involvement with and control over natural resource decision-making pursuant to agreed fundamental values.
