By 2024 Pritzker Award finalist Callie Annette Veelenturf
On a global scale, current efforts to protect nature have not halted devastating declines and climactic imbalances. Humanity’s behavior must shift drastically to protect the natural balance of our world. It is time to explore new ways of protecting Nature.
I have always known that protecting Nature was my calling. As a child I spent a lot of time outside with my family catching frogs, turtles and snakes around my childhood home and grandparents’ farm. I felt connected to and at home in Nature. I grew up knowing that humanity’s relationship with Nature is out of balance and feeling a burning desire to do something about it.
On my 18th birthday, I encountered a sea turtle for the first time. We shared soulful eye contact, and I felt a wave of responsibility to learn about sea turtles and the threats that they face and to use my life to protect them. The leatherback sea turtle has existed for 110 million years, only now to be threatened with local extinctions due to consistent anthropogenic pressures. After studying East Pacific leatherback turtles in the field, I realized that I was personally witnessing the local extinction trajectory of this ancient reptile.
At 26 years old I was incredibly excited to begin my first job as a marine biologist after receiving my master’s degree. Unfortunately, I entered an unsafe work environment, where I faced ongoing sexual harassment. After six months of trying to protect myself via ordinary measures, I had no choice but to take legal action. Defending my rights taught me the power of rights-based protection measures. Having established rights on a federal level that protected me was ultimately the only thing that held the organization accountable.
To move on in a positive way from this negative experience, I wanted to learn how to better protect Nature through defending Nature’s rights in my work. I found that, in our legal systems, Nature largely has no intrinsic rights, so her rights couldn’t be defended in the way that I had defended my own. This was a lightbulb moment.
I began reading about the Rights of Nature (RoN), and it became the single most powerful concept that has given me hope for the future of society’s relationship with Nature. This concept is protecting Nature by taking a rights-based approach. Most of our current environmental laws simply put a report, a timeline or a price in the way of continued, long-term destruction of natural ecosystems. The RoN framework considers the needs of the planet’s ecosystems, to inform how society can thrive alongside those needs to maintain healthy ecosystem functioning and biodiversity populations. It legally requires people, corporations and governments to include these intrinsic needs and rights in all levels of decision making.
I believe leatherback turtles and many other flagship species harness great power to inspire an empathetic shift in the way that society views nonhuman life, which could spark a new wave of action for the planet. In 2019, I felt compelled to found The Leatherback Project to pursue this mission. My first project was funded through an Early Career Grant from the National Geographic Society to identify sea turtle nesting and foraging sites, community relationships, key threats and conservation priorities in the Pearl Islands Archipelago, Panama. I purchased the book “The Rights of Nature, a Legal Revolution that Could Save the World,” by David Boyd, to read in my tent at night on the remote sea turtle nesting beaches in Panama.
With limited internet access, I was receiving sporadic overwhelming updates about the wildfires raging in the Amazon and Australia alongside news about the lack of global action for the climate, all while seeing many of the ways that current environmental law was not protecting threatened turtle species in Panama from unsustainable fishing practices, loss of nesting beaches from sea level rise, and the illegal wildlife trade. Simultaneously I was reading about inspiring RoN cases while healing from my journey in defending my own rights. These four experiences lit a fire within me to propose a new RoN law in Panama. I had nothing to lose in trying.
In February 2020, I used compelling multimedia and datasets from the field to make the case to Panama’s First Lady Yazmin Cortizo and Congressman Juan Diego Vasquez that recognizing the RoN is the most impactful way to cause a cascading system effect throughout society to find harmony with Nature. They agreed, and we spent the next two years during the pandemic drafting, debating, and revising the law with the public, Parliament and the Earth Law Center.
The President signed this new law on February 24th, 2022. Nature in Panama now has a long list of intrinsic rights, including the right to 1) exist, 2) persist, 3) regenerate vital cycles, 4) be restored and even 5) have legal representation in court. Today, any member of Panama’s society can bring violators of these rights to court on Nature’s behalf.
The RoN law has been implemented at least four times to date.
- The RoN was used as the justification for the creation of the Environmental Committee of the National Air and Navy Service of Panama (SENAN), of which I am the Scientific Advisor. The first act of the Environmental Committee was to train over 2400 soldiers in the successful identification of illegal turtle shell products to fight wildlife crime.
- With the Earth Law Center, I proposed Article 29 of Law 371 that recognizes sea turtles as legal entities with specific rights.
- The RoN law was cited amongst the justifications for the closure of the Donoso Copper Mine in Panama that was in a Key Biodiversity Area.
- Most recently, the Minister of the Environment of Panama signed into effect the Saboga Island National Wildlife Refuge to protect a new-to-science endangered turtle foraging ground, a proposal led by The Leatherback Project and Ministry of the Environment, citing the need to treat nature within the Refuge as a subject of rights to ensure its ultimate preservation.
After Panama’s RoN law was passed and implemented, I began to receive interest from many storytellers, scientists, and even governments around the world who are interested in proposing similar protection measures. To support these visions, I am leading a new initiative, called For Nature, to utilize science and storytelling to generate high-impact conservation proposals, explore innovative ways of protecting nature, and advance the RoN.
Now is not the time to be discouraged by the current state of the ecological crises, but to generate inspiring proposals of an ethical and moral nature to rapidly guide society into a more harmonious relationship with, as part of, Nature. It’s time to recognize the Rights of Nature worldwide. Most transformative concepts start out as radical because they are new, not because they truly are radical. Just as the Women’s Suffrage and Civil Rights movements changed the world in the 1900s, let the Rights of Nature movement do the same now, and let us create this system change together.