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.

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.