Earth Jurisprudence: Its Foundations and Importance

Key concepts that everyone should know: Earth laws, relationist ethos, rights of nature, ecocide, and their development

There has been some shift toward Earth-centred law and governance. This represents a serious intellectual response, and somewhat practical response (still to reach any kind of full fruition), to the ecological crises of the modern era. At the heart of this movement lies Earth jurisprudence, a concept associated with cultural historian and philosopher Thomas Berry (1914–2009). He is best known for arguing that humanity must shift from a human-centred worldview to an Earth-centred one.

Earth jurisprudence

For Berry, and others, Earth jurisprudence is a legal philosophy that holds human law should be grounded in ecological principles and life-support limits of the living Earth, rather than organised solely around human benefit. It calls for governance that recognises nature’s intrinsic worth and rights. This would align economic and political institutions with ecological integrity and long-term planetary balance. Here balance means a stable, sustainable state where Earth’s life-support systems (climate, atmosphere, water cycles, oceans, soils, biodiversity) remain healthy enough over decades and centuries to keep supporting human and non-human life.

In The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999), Berry argues that industrial civilisation has been built upon an intensely anthropocentric worldview. One that frames the natural world as inert matter to be owned, extracted and reorganised for human purposes. He identifies law and government, economics, education (especially universities) and religion as the core institutions that have entrenched this worldview, legitimising patterns of domination over the Earth rather than membership within it. Berry therefore called for a civilisational shift: from human-centred governance to an Earth-centred paradigm in which laws and institutions align with deeper ‘laws’ of an Earth community. This recognises humanity as one interdependent participant within a larger living system, not its master.

Earth laws has emerged as an umbrella term for this evolving field of theory and practice. It has Earth jurisprudence as its philosophical foundation. The normative principles that arise from or are implied in this philosophy are concerned with how the living Earth actually works, such as:

• interdependence (species and systems rely on each other),
• ecological integrity (ecosystems must remain functional and whole),
• regeneration (life depends on renewal, not one-way extraction),
• limits and carrying capacity (there are biophysical boundaries),
• diversity and resilience (variety sustains stability and adaptation),
• reciprocity and balance (taking must be matched by care/restoration).

Accordingly, Earth systems embody conditions that make life possible, and law should respect them. From there Earth jurisprudence, and its envisaged Earth laws, also incorporates related developments such as ecological governance, the campaign to criminalise severe ecological harm through ecocide, rights-based approaches like the rights of nature, and efforts to bridge Western legal systems with Indigenous first nations laws and traditional ecological knowledge. Together, these strands challenge the assumption that environmental protection is merely a policy choice or economic constraint. Instead, they treat environmental protection as a question of lawful relationship: how humans ought to live within the limits, integrity and dignity of Earth.

Relationist ethos

A recent contribution that adds to this ethical foundation comes from Indigenous Australian philosophy, particularly the work of Mary Graham, a Kombumerri and Waka Waka scholar, whose articulation of a relationist ethos offers a powerful alternative to extractive and individualistic paradigms. The relationist ethos holds that existence is fundamentally relational: humans, land/Country, animals and plants, waters, and other elemental forces are interconnected; and humans have obligations of care and reciprocity towards them. The land–people relationship is reciprocal, in that the land created us because humans evolved from Earth’s biosphere and are made from its matter, and the land looks after us because healthy ecosystems provide the food, water, climate stability, and ecological functions that keep human societies alive, thus reciprocally humans must look after the land. This becomes a template for social order.

On this view, responsibility does not arise after so-called ownership; it precedes it. Indeed, ownership can be considered a misnomer, because property or usufructuary rights are not simply about possessing a thing, but about a legally defined bundle of rights and obligations in relation to that thing. This is cultural wisdom, but the relationist ethos also offers normative principles for Earth-centred governance. In this regard, Graham emphasises that genuine relationality depends on the following three key conditions:

• Empathy and ethics, which cultivate stewardship and moral responsibility. Empathy is what allows humans to feel the reality of interdependence, and ethics is what turns that feeling into principled responsibility rather than momentary sentiment or urges.
• Autonomy, which respects the distinct integrity and self-determination of beings and places. This is because the natural world as a living whole is made up of distinct, self-organising parts, with wholeness being preserved when each part (or unit or unit being) is allowed to retain its own integrity.
• Balance, which acts as a discipline of limits, proportionate actions, and reciprocity. It thus maintains equilibrium in human–Earth relationships, governance, and decision-making so that domination, exploitation and destabilisation do not become normalised. This prevents any one interest (profit, power, convenience, even human need) from overrunning the conditions that keep a community and its land healthy.

Rights of nature

Mary Graham’s relationist ethos slides into rights of nature concepts because it treats land/Country and living beings as participants in a whole, though with their own integrity and standing. This leads to the idea that legal rights should be a way of formally recognising and protecting the reciprocal obligations that already exist within the Earth community. On this kind of basis, the global rights of nature movement has become one of the most visible manifestations of Earth-centred thinking, which seeks to transform nature’s legal status from mere property or resource into a rights-bearing subject. Across jurisdictions, advocates have pursued diverse strategies to embed this recognition into Western legal systems.

Some approaches operate at constitutional or national level, as in Ecuador, whose 2008 Constitution recognises Pachamama (Mother Earth) as possessing rights to exist, regenerate and maintain ecological cycles. Similarly, in Bolivia legislation of 2012 reflects the ethic of Vivir Bien (Good Living) in harmony with nature. At the level of constitutional law and national legislation, these reforms institutionalise ecological integrity as a foundational legal principle, embedding the protection of nature’s rights into the highest sources of legal authority rather than treating environmental care as a secondary policy choice to other choices.

Other initiatives protect specific ecosystems, such as Colombia’s Atrato River, recognised by Colombia Constitutional Court in 2016 as a rights-bearing entity with protections extending across its basin and tributaries. Developments such as these also represent a legal opening for Indigenous law to shape Western governance. For example, in New Zealand (Aotearoa) the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 grants legal personhood to the Whanganui River as an indivisible living whole consistent with Māori cosmology. Also, Aotearoa’s Te Urewera Act 2014 recognises Te Urewera (a large forest in the North Island culturally significant to the Tūhoe iwi/tribe) as a legal entity with its own mana (authority, dignity and spiritual power) and mauri (life force). Under this law, the forest’s health, integrity and ability to flourish is protected and it is recognised not as property of the Crown (or state), but as a legal entity in its own right.

Rights of nature have even been articulated for particular species as in the White Earth Band of Ojibwe’s 2018 tribal law, a resolution affirming the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice) to exist, flourish, regenerate and be preserved. This tribal law grounds its authority in a treaty of 1855 (Treaty of Washington) which is an agreement between the United States and several Ojibwe (Chippewa) bands that created the White Earth Reservation securing continuing Ojibwe rights and responsibilities connected to their lands and waters in the Great Lakes region of the United States and Canada. Manoomin (wild rice) is not only a plant but is central to identity, livelihood and traditional law. By recognising Manoomin’s inherent rights, the White Earth Band reframes wild rice as a rights-bearing being, not a commodity or resource to be exploited. This also provides a basis to challenge pollution, habitat destruction, or industrial practices that threaten wild rice beds and the waters that sustain them.

Crime of ecocide

In the above ways, rights of nature laws have worked as a concrete tool for protecting both ecological integrity and cultural survival at the same time. Complementing these rights-based innovations is the parallel push to criminalise catastrophic environmental harm through ecocide law. Ecocide is often described in general terms as the mass damage or destruction of ecosystems, but credible legal development demands precision.

In 2021, Stop Ecocide International convened an Independent Expert Panel that proposed a definition suitable for potential inclusion in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). That definition reads: “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. This formulation deliberately anchors the crime in high thresholds typical of ICC jurisdiction: “severe”, “widespread” and “long-term”, while also clarifying that “wanton” denotes reckless disregard where harm is clearly excessive relative to any expected benefits. The ecocide framework thus targets the extreme end of environmental wrongdoing: conduct so destructive that it threatens Earth systems and the conditions of life itself.

Though intended as international law, ecocide is now instead progressing in some national legislative and constitutional channels, especially in Africa, with possible uptake in domestic criminal laws. It is also figuring in regional diplomacy. For example, the Congo Basin Climate Commission (CBCC) mounted a regional bloc (17 states) push on 17 December 2025 to call for ecocide to be recognised as an international crime, and indicated that at the regional level the African Union could be mobilised to this end. Also, Pacific islands states including Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have advanced a formal push to recognise ecocide as an international crime, signalling that for climate-vulnerable countries ecocide is increasingly framed as a matter of global justice, not optional environmental policy.

In regard to Africa, in Ghana on 22 December 2025 ecocide entered a state-mandated constitutional review process, with the Constitution Review Committee proposing the establishment of a domestic crime of ecocide as part of a broader environmental reform package. This suggests ecocide could be anchored in Ghana’s core governance architecture, signalling that ecological destruction should be treated as a matter of national legal principle rather than ordinary regulation. This aligns with emerging African efforts to recognise severe ecological destruction as a criminal wrong rather than a mere policy failure.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), on 15 December 2025, a senator lodged an Ecocide Bill in Parliament proposing amendments to the country’s penal code. This would introduce ecocide as a standalone offence, applicable in both peacetime and armed conflict. Importantly, the proposed Bill reportedly adopts wording aligned with the 2021 expert definition to be directly transplanted into national law. While this appears to be an individual of small-group initiative in the Parliament, it indicates widening interest in the implementation of ecocide criminal laws.

Conclusion

Taken together — Berry’s critique of industrial anthropocentrism and call for development of Earth jurisprudence, Graham’s relational philosophy of care for land with ethical human obligations, the legal rise of rights of nature, and the emerging precision of an ecocide definition and resulting inter-state diplomacy — Earth laws reflect a widening global movement toward governance that honours Earth’s intrinsic value and integrity. This transition is not merely a technical adjustment to policy settings. It is an ethical and legal reorientation away from human exceptionalism toward the recognition that human prosperity depends upon living within a broader community of life.

Thus, Earth jurisprudence and its Earth-centred laws offer not only new legal tools, but a necessary shift in civilisation’s self-understanding: from ownership to relationship, from extraction to reciprocity, and from domination to balance. They insist that the legitimacy of human law can no longer rest solely on economic growth or sovereign power, but must be measured against whether it protects the living systems that make life possible. In doing so, Earth-centred governance reframes the notion of development as well — it has to include living with dignity (for at least sentient life forms), because prosperity that depends on ecological breakdown or the dispossession of others is not development at all, but deferred collapse and morally outsourced harm.

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