Environmental Law’s Missing Piece: The Right to Nature

For decades, environmental law has been trapped in a binary value system: it either treats nature instrumentally, as property to be used for human benefit, or views it as intrinsically valuable, deserving protection for its own sake. Both approaches, though ethically powerful, have struggled to deliver consistent and enforceable protections. As ecological crises deepen, this conceptual stalemate is no longer just inadequate—it is dangerous. This article argues that environmental law remains structurally incomplete.

It has overlooked a third category of value—relational value—long recognized in ethics and conservation science but largely absent from legal doctrine. Relational values arise from the lived, identity-shaping relationships people form with land, species, and ecosystems—bonds of belonging, care, and interdependence that are essential to both human flourishing and ecological resilience. By ignoring these values, the law has failed to account for the most immediate and meaningful ways people experience and respond to environmental harm. This article introduces the Right to Nature—a legal framework that embeds these relationships into existing legal systems.

By grounding environmental protection in the interdependence of people and place, this approach offers a coherent, enforceable, and normatively compelling foundation for environmental governance—one that reflects how people actually live with, depend on, and care for the natural world.