Thomas Linzey on the Nature Rights Movement

Dickson Adom March 27, 2025, 4:56 p.m.

Thomas Linzey on the Nature Rights Movement

Most people support responsible environmental policies but may be unaware of how radical the leading edge of the movement has become as an increasing number of activists support granting personhood rights to nature.

Is nature rights a subversive threat to human exceptionalism and our thriving or is it the next necessary step in society’s moral growth and key to preventing a catastrophic environmental collapse as its adherents claim? Let’s find out.

Wesley’s guest is one of the primary founders of the nature rights approach. Thomas Alan Linzey, serves as Senior Legal Counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, an organization committed to globally advancing the legal rights of nature and environmental rights. He is the co-founder of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) and is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” and “rights of nature” movements.

Linzey is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He is a co-founder of the Daniel Pennock Democracy School – now taught in twenty-four states across the country which has graduated over 5,000 lawyers, activists, and municipal officials – which assists groups to create new community campaigns which elevate the rights of those communities over rights claimed by corporations. Linzey is the author or co-author of several books on community activism and civil disobedience. He assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly in 2008 to adopt the world’s first constitution recognizing the independently enforceable rights of ecosystems, and is a frequent lecturer at conferences across the country.

The Center on Human Exceptionalism is most pleased Linzey agreed to join the podcast, during which he and Wesley have a discussion not an argument.