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The Forest Fights Back: A Global Movement for the Rights of Nature
‘The Rights of Nature movement is one of the few rays of light on the dimming horizons of a planet. Jessica den Outer takes readers on a journey across the globe to chart the achievements of courageous activists, indigenous leaders and legal innovators’ – Amitav Ghosh
‘Jessica den Outer lends her voice to forests, rivers, and ecosystems that cannot speak for themselves. Read this book and you will be inspired to take action’ – Jane Goodall
As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.
In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement – Rights of Nature – taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity. This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature.
Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted by and has spoken for institutions such as the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work.
‘Jessica den Outer lends her voice to forests, rivers, and ecosystems that cannot speak for themselves. Read this book and you will be inspired to take action’ – Jane Goodall
As the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis, ecosystems are collapsing, and the planet’s future hangs in the balance. For centuries, our legal systems have treated nature as something to be owned and exploited, but a bold new movement is challenging this paradigm.
In The Forest Fights Back, Jessica den Outer explores a groundbreaking global movement – Rights of Nature – taking on the legal system to recognise the rights of rivers, forests, and mountains to exist, flourish, and sustain their ecological balance. From the fight for the Whanganui River in New Zealand to the battle for Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon, den Outer highlights the campaigns led by grassroots communities, telling stories of determination and legal ingenuity. This movement goes beyond law – it represents a cultural shift that could reshape how we live, think, co-exist and advocate for nature.
Jessica den Outer is an expert in environmental law who advocates globally for the Rights of Nature. Since 2017, she’s been consulted by and has spoken for institutions such as the UN and Harvard. She founded the NGO ‘Stichting Rechten van de Natuur’ and has received numerous awards for her pioneering work.
160 pages, Paperback
Published January 20, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Did Not Finish
July 9, 2026Great info, but I was spoiled by Robert Macfarlane's beautiful and compelling "Is A River Alive?" on this subject matter.
June 10, 2026
Great introduction to the Right of Nature as a legal concept. While going away from the usual "how does ecological damage effect humans and the ✨️economy✨️(?!)" instead, how does this effect nature itself. Treats nature as a subject with an agency that needs to be protected, instead of an object for humans to benefit from. Den Outer tells it in a way that easy to digest and bring into daily discussions around conservation! Great read and pretty short as well! (At 127 pages). Would recommend as a starter to the Rights of Nature concept and generally anyone interested in nature conservation 🫶🫶
June 1, 2026
Largely Eurocentric in worldview, but still had a lot to say about the budding legal realm on the rights of nature. I learned a lot about different nature focused policies around the world, which I appreciate.
September 21, 2025
Should trees have legal standing? That was the entirely novel, and really very provocative, legal idea first advanced by Christopher D. Stone in 1972. It argued for a recognition of legal environmental personhood for certain environmental entities. Environmental personhood would substitute for nature being generally seen as property. The law journal article influenced some legal and political thinkers, including Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court. Douglas’ dissenting opinion in an appeal to the court brought by the Sierra Club actually brought forth a seriously derisive reaction in legal circles. The original article and the legal reaction had focused on the use of the historic legal doctrine and requirement of standing. Standing is a requirement of legal and judicial systems like the United States that a party have a sufficient connection to the harm inflicted that a legal action is warranted. This connection establishes that a party to a legal matter is entitled by the law to have the merits of a legal dispute or issue resolved by appropriate legal institutions. So, should trees have legal standing? Stone’s 1972 article argued for a recognition of environmental personhood. The environmental movement for such legal recognition continued to gradually grow. That very idea of environmental personhood is at the heart of this new book. The author asks a similar question: If people and companies can have defined legal rights, why can’t the environment of rivers, forests and mountains? The book sets out the justification for a global Rights of Nature movement, a movement which challenges the tradition of treating nature as property. The author is a Dutch environmental lawyer involved since 2017 in the international Rights of Nature movement. She has championed citizen activism in The Netherlands, with many nongovernmental organizations around the world, and through the United Nations. The focus of this book is on law, morality, and the environment. It highlights grassroots campaigns from New Zealand’s Whanganui River to Spain’s Mar Menor lagoon to the Colombian Amazon rainforest and to activism in Florida and Pennsylvania in the United States. The book has been described as advocating for a broader cultural shift in how humanity relates to and defends nature. This is a challenging call for citizen environmental activism. Highly recommended for all readers but especially for the reader concerned about worldwide environmental justice. It is, however, a book that should be read by the reader concerned with broad environmental issues and by all who are concerned with pressing public policy matters.
September 18, 2026
This is a short, breezy and easy-to-read introduction to the Rights of Nature movement across the world. It provides a largely anglophone world tour of community-driven legal interventions across the United States, Latin America, Australasia and Europe, in the name of rivers, forests, a lagoon and related ecosystems.
Inevitably the brevity misses out some details, and frequently I felt the book begged questions that it didn't face up to answering. Things like:
— Such-and-such a campaign failed because of poor legal arguments: well what was it about the arguments that made them poor, and how might they be improved?
— There is an assumption that attributing rights to nature is always a good thing, but the possibility of there being another side of the coin is rarely acknowledged: for example, what if the expansion of rights to nature was extended to artificial intelligence entities? do rights come with responsibilities and agency, and how might this apply to nature?
— How does legislative action interact with other forms of nature activism? Presumably there is an ecosystem of legal, protest and resistance-based actions? When is the legal route more or less effective than other approaches?
There is a focus exclusively on developments in the 21st Century. The book cites the Navajo people writing the Rights of Nature written in their 2002 Diné Fundamental Laws, as though this were the first acknowledgment even by Indigenous cultures. But surely many such cultures have had respect and agency for nature embedded in their societies for centuries, whether or not they documented this in a form that we in the Majority World would recognise as ‘laws’?
The focus on recent legislation means that there is almost no coverage of case law and how the power of this legislation is tested in court, especially when it comes into conflict with powerful corporate interests. For this, reference to Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, where a court ruled in the 1990s for the interests of mountain on a Scottish Island, against the interests of the corporation that wanted to mine may be of interest. That book also narrates the collaboration between Scots and Indigenous tribespeople from North America.
Inevitably the brevity misses out some details, and frequently I felt the book begged questions that it didn't face up to answering. Things like:
— Such-and-such a campaign failed because of poor legal arguments: well what was it about the arguments that made them poor, and how might they be improved?
— There is an assumption that attributing rights to nature is always a good thing, but the possibility of there being another side of the coin is rarely acknowledged: for example, what if the expansion of rights to nature was extended to artificial intelligence entities? do rights come with responsibilities and agency, and how might this apply to nature?
— How does legislative action interact with other forms of nature activism? Presumably there is an ecosystem of legal, protest and resistance-based actions? When is the legal route more or less effective than other approaches?
There is a focus exclusively on developments in the 21st Century. The book cites the Navajo people writing the Rights of Nature written in their 2002 Diné Fundamental Laws, as though this were the first acknowledgment even by Indigenous cultures. But surely many such cultures have had respect and agency for nature embedded in their societies for centuries, whether or not they documented this in a form that we in the Majority World would recognise as ‘laws’?
The focus on recent legislation means that there is almost no coverage of case law and how the power of this legislation is tested in court, especially when it comes into conflict with powerful corporate interests. For this, reference to Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, where a court ruled in the 1990s for the interests of mountain on a Scottish Island, against the interests of the corporation that wanted to mine may be of interest. That book also narrates the collaboration between Scots and Indigenous tribespeople from North America.
September 21, 2026
This is a short, friendly tour of places where rivers, lakes and forests have been given legal rights, from Ecuador's constitution to the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Den Outer wants to show that anyone can take this up, and as an introduction it does that. As I was persuaded of this idea already, both on policy grounds, as well as emotively through McFarlane's book on the same concept, I wanted more on the hard part. Who speaks for a river in court, and would this change outcomes in the Netherlands or elsewhere compared with the environmental law we already have? Given the first example presented - the Sierra Club - has been in recent years put under scrutiny by the abundance movement, I feel that the rights-based approach need a justification that incorporates these critiques in its initial formulations as well.
Introduction texts are usually not novel for the converted, so the test is whether the text converts. I'm not sure this book does that well enough.
Introduction texts are usually not novel for the converted, so the test is whether the text converts. I'm not sure this book does that well enough.
March 21, 2026
The Forest Fights Back presents the interesting concept of examining the fights to give the environment legal personhood to help protect it from human exploitation and degradation.
This book I think is probably most useful as a jumping off point, the bulk of the text is 125 pages and covers 11 examples which does have the impact of making all of them somewhat surface level and as a whole the author doesn't seem to really present a case for having an impact moving on once the rights have been granted without considering implementation or efficacy.
It is, however, well written, and the author has succeeded in making several separate legal systems accessible and legible to the reader.
This book I think is probably most useful as a jumping off point, the bulk of the text is 125 pages and covers 11 examples which does have the impact of making all of them somewhat surface level and as a whole the author doesn't seem to really present a case for having an impact moving on once the rights have been granted without considering implementation or efficacy.
It is, however, well written, and the author has succeeded in making several separate legal systems accessible and legible to the reader.
June 25, 2026
Interesting anecdotal examples, but not very structured and kind of stream-of-consciousness. This is my fundamental problem with "movements" like this. Where we need good analysis, a clear-eyed assessment of interests and points of leverage and a solid global strategy, we get emotion-driven storytelling. That's just not going to cut it, given the size of the problem and the power and wealth of opposition. Where are all the systems thinkers and strategists in the environmental space? We need that leadership.
October 23, 2025
Very approachable and engaging introduction to the Rights of Nature movement! If you're looking for hope in the fight for climate change, this is a quick and heartening read.
April 26, 2026
3.5 - inspiring!!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews