Socio-ecological thinking challenges the traditional approaches to human rights, based on an abstracted bounded individual subject atomised out of social relations and separated from any ecological world. Here, a socio-ecological relational approach is taken to human rights.

This report seeks to map out the breadth and depth of what Rights of Nature legislation could cover, including the different possible elements of a legislative framework, considering subjecthood as a spectrum, the breadth of legal effects Rights of Nature can have, and some possible legislative models Much of this is relevant for anyone thinking about how best to implant Rights of Nature.

This is a 90-page archive of Alex May’s notes on the Interconnected Law project. This document has been prepared by an editor in case it is of use to anyone interested in the archive and working with it.

This article is taken from the foundations section of my (forthcoming) report about Rights of Nature legislation. I thought it was worth publishing as a stand-alone blog post. 2.1 An Overview of Rights of Nature In this section I seek to give an overview of the idea(s) of Rights of Nature and (briefly) set out […]

An understanding of Social Ecology focuses the idea that Rights of Nature must be rooted in changing social relations.  Note: this blog post was started by Alex May in early 2026. Due to severe illness Alex was unable to complete this alone. The unfinished blog was posted, with a description of the draft status at […]

Interconnected Law prompts us to think in terms of socio-ecological relations, coming from the key insight of Social Ecology that any environmental relations are intertwined with social relations. Ecological and environmental thinking is necessarily relational because ecology is relational and thinking about the environment is thinking about human relationships to it, and there is environmental law scholarship – such as socio-legal and political ecology approaches – which could be considered to be relational and perhaps sometimes within a socio-ecological paradigm. Yet most thinking is still rooted in conceptions of humans as fundamentally separate from nature, and often does not understand humans as socially relational.