File:Florida rights of nature lawsuit - May 2021.jpg

Via The Guardian / May 2021

A network of streams, lakes and marshes in Florida is suing a developer and the state to try to stop a housing development from destroying them.

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/01/florida-rights-of-nature-lawsuit-waterways-housing-development

The novel lawsuit was filed on Monday in Orange county on behalf of the waterways under a “rights of nature” law passed in November. It is the largest US municipality to adopt such a law to date.

The listed plaintiffs are Wilde Cypress Branch, Boggy Branch, Crosby Island Marsh, Lake Hart and Lake Mary Jane.

Laws protecting the rights of nature are growing throughout the world, from Ecuador to Uganda, and have been upheld in courts in India, Colombia and Bangladesh. But this is the first time anyone has tried to enforce them in the US.

The Orange county law secures the rights of its waterways to exist, to flow, to be protected against pollution and to maintain a healthy ecosystem. It also recognizes the authority of citizens to file enforcement actions on their behalf.

The suit, filed in the ninth judicial circuit court of Florida, claims a proposed 1,900-acre housing development by Beachline South Residential LLC would destroy more than 63 acres of wetlands and 33 acres of streams by filling and polluting them, as well as 18 acres of wetlands where stormwater detention ponds are being built....

Thomas Linzey, senior legal counsel at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights who helped secure Orange county’s rights of nature law last year, said: “Given the rampant development that’s occurred in Florida over the past 30 years, and the power struggle between the state government and local government over these issues, there are multiple grounds for a court to hold that the development cannot proceed as proposed.” (More about Tom Linzey follows)

The center calculates that more than 9m acres of wetlands have been destroyed in Florida since it became a state in 1845. They say this has had profound impacts on water quality and species, as well as flood control.

The Florida department of environmental protection said it would not comment on pending litigation.

Update:

A Lake in Florida Is Suing to Protect Itself

By Elizabeth Kolbert / The New Yorker Magazine

April 2022

• https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/18/a-lake-in-florida-suing-to-protect-itself

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Thomas Linzey & Mari Margil – Occupy the Law: The Movement for Community Rights and the Rights of Nature

As species collapse around the world while governments still authorize fossil fuel extraction and other destructive, unsustainable activities, communities across the U.S. are rising in resistance to “occupy the law”. They’re enacting “community bills of rights” that recognize a community’s legally enforceable right to sustainability and the rights of nature. Two of its most effective path-finding national and global leaders, Tom Linzey and Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, show how this movement challenges our constitutional framework in which corporate rights and the preemptive authority of state and federal governments block sustainability, environmental protection and democracy. (2016)

• https://bioneers.org/thomas-linzey-mari-margil-occupy-the-law-bioneers/

• https://conference.bioneers.org/speaker/thomas-linzey/

• https://bioneers.org/thomas-linzey-turning-defense-into-offense-bioneers/

More about Rights of Nature at GreenPolicy360

• https://www.greenpolicy360.net/w/Rights_of_Nature_EarthLaw

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