Specifying Nature As a Rights-Holder

The chapter addresses the question of how “nature” in rights of nature should be defined: that is, what kind(s) of non-human natural entities should be eligible for the conferral of rights. To specify the potential rights-holder when recognizing rights of nature, it discusses the main streams of physiocentrism, i.e. non-anthropocentrism, as ethical reference points for a legal recognition. Taking a legal perspective, it analyzes the approaches’ compatibility with and desirability within liberal legal systems. In doing so, the chapter argues that the physiocentric streams of zoocentrism and holism are, at least with a view to liberal legal systems, inconsistent and either insufficient or unsuitable for serving as underlying physiocentric concepts for the recognition of rights of nature in Western liberal states. Instead, following biocentrism with its focus on life, and ecocentrism, which allows the ascription of rights to ecological collectives on a scientific basis, it proposes an ecocentrically extended biocentrism according to which rights are conferred to all individual living beings as well as to ecosystems and species.