The Personhood of Nature — Marina Lostal in Conversation with Nancy Couling
ETH ZURICH LECTURE REVIEW, by Hanna B. Hölling
ETH Zurich, March 30, 2026
At a lecture held at ETH Zurich on March 30, 2026, Marina Lostal presented a wide-ranging reflection on the emerging field of the Rights of Nature. The talk, part of a broader series Conservation: A Spatial Practice of Repair available on YouTube, situated contemporary legal transformations within a larger philosophical and political critique of extractive capitalism, environmental governance, and the anthropocentric foundations of modern law.
Lostal began by describing the Rights of Nature as a contested and rapidly changing field. Her own trajectory, she explained, had moved from territorial and heritage-related questions in places such as Kenya to broader concerns in Europe and Latin America. She reflected on her involvement in landmark cases concerning the destruction of cultural heritage in Mali, where she acted as an expert in reparations proceedings before the International Criminal Court, as well as her work in Colombia. Her recent research, including work forthcoming with Cambridge University Press and the article “The Rights of Nature: Three Models,” positions the Rights of Nature within emergent socio-legal studies.
A central proposition of the lecture was that architecture and law are both practices of world-making — an observation that resonates strongly with conservation as well. Drawing on the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse, Lostal argued that philosophy begins by questioning why things are the way they are and by exposing social arrangements that have become unlivable. The present historical moment, she suggested, is defined by extractive capitalism: a rationality in which everything becomes subject to commodification, valuation, and accumulation. Cities, highways, and infrastructures are designed to maximize consumption, while the logic of the system has become internalized within individuals themselves. In a world of finite resources, societies continue to desire more, despite the environmental destruction and social marginalization this perpetuates.
Referencing Guy Debord and later Michelle Farrell, Lostal emphasized that the environmental crisis cannot be separated from capitalism itself. Farrell’s provocation — “there is no such thing as a climate emergency; the emergency is capitalism” — framed much of the discussion. Environmental law, Lostal argued, has historically operated within the same paradigm of economic growth it ostensibly seeks to regulate. Nature is fragmented into manageable units, positioned as an object over which humans exercise mastery. Mechanisms such as “loss and damage” compensation funds reveal this contradiction: they compensate for environmental destruction financially while leaving the extractive system itself intact.
Against this backdrop, the Rights of Nature emerge as an attempt to imagine different ontologies and legal relations. What if rivers were not merely corridors to be managed, or land not simply surfaces onto which economic value is projected? Lostal traced one foundational moment to the famous 1972 case concerning the proposed development of a ski resort in California’s Mineral King Valley. Because the valley lacked legal standing, it could not “sue” in court. This led to the influential article “Should Trees Have Standing?”, which challenged the assumption that only humans — or legally constructed entities such as corporations, ships, and associations — could possess legal personhood. Just as women and children had historically been excluded from full legal recognition, so too had nature remained outside the sphere of legal subjects.
Although the early legal efforts did not succeed immediately, they introduced what Lostal described as “the first crack” in an otherwise one-dimensional legal order. Indigenous philosophies, she noted, had long understood rivers, forests, and landscapes as entities with personhood and relational agency. Such perspectives became increasingly influential in contemporary legal reforms.
The lecture then turned to the rapid global expansion of Rights of Nature initiatives, which António Guterres has described as one of the fastest-growing legal movements in the world. A key milestone was the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, which recognized Pachamama — nature — as possessing the right to exist and regenerate. This constitutional framework granted nature legal standing before courts.
Lostal discussed a typology proposed by legal scholar Daniel Borrás, distinguishing between three models: “poetic,” “mimetic,” and “oppositional.” Ecuador and New Zealand exemplify the poetic model, introducing genuinely new legal imaginaries. Mimetic models include countries such as Colombia, India, and Bangladesh, which adapted or replicated aspects of these frameworks. Oppositional contexts, such as the United States and the United Kingdom, remain more resistant.
Yet the movement is fraught with paradoxes. Ecuador’s model grants rights broadly to all nature, but enforcement often remains reactive and dependent on political will, expertise, and access to legal systems. New Zealand’s approach, by contrast, selectively grants legal personhood to specific entities such as the Whanganui River, also known as Te Awa Tupua — “the river of sacred power.” However, selectivity itself creates hierarchies, determining which aspects of nature are worthy of recognition and which remain excluded.
Lostal emphasized that even where legal personhood has been established, judges and institutions remain trained within older paradigms of environmental law. Consequently, many interpretations continue to revert back to anthropocentric assumptions. Nevertheless, she argued that these initiatives remain pioneering because they create openings — “cracks” in a dominant system sustained by what she described as a collective social hypnosis.
The second part of the event included reflections by Nancy Couling, Associate Professor in Bergen and senior researcher, whose work examines the rights of the Venice Lagoon. Couling framed conservation itself as a spatial practice of repair. Discussions surrounding the Venice Lagoon, including the “Policy Lab” and the “Declaration for the Rights of the Venice Lagoon,” were presented as examples of eco-jurisprudential experimentation.[1]
The lecture also touched on wider legal frameworks such as UNCLOS (the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea), debates around ocean rights, and the concept of “slow violence,” referencing environmental destruction that unfolds incrementally and often invisibly over time.
Throughout the event, a recurring theme was the necessity of an epistemic shift. Rights of Nature do not simply propose new laws; they challenge fundamental assumptions about subjecthood, relationality, care, and temporality. Closely connected were discussions of Indigenous worldviews, future generations, and philosophies centered on care rather than extraction. Ultimately, the lecture suggested that the Rights of Nature movement represents less a completed legal solution than an ongoing struggle to imagine and enact radically different ways of inhabiting the world.
[1] Eco-jurisprudence (or ecological jurisprudence) is a legal philosophy that shifts from human-centered law to an Earth-centered approach, recognizing the intrinsic value of nature, ecosystems, and non-human life. It fundamentally rejects treating nature merely as property, proposing instead to grant legal standing, rights, and protection to nature.