Exploring Potentials

A new approach can and should only be recognized and implemented if it offers advantages over the status quo. The chapter analyzes the potential benefits of implementing rights of nature in liberal legal systems. It seeks to discover why rights of nature can help to reconsider and re-imagine the (legal) human-nature relationship, and thus to overcome the deeply rooted (cultural-)legal biases and defects that have contributed to the current environmental catastrophe. To this end, it begins with analyzing why conventional law is insufficient to solve the ecological crisis. The chapter then explores the theoretical advantages of rights of nature over anthropocentric law and their practical impact on the effectiveness of environmental law. Subsequently, it shows how rights of nature overcome the current hypocrisy of environmental law and analyzes the extent to which rights of nature also impact the non-legal sphere. Finally, it discusses anthropocentric reasons for implementing rights of nature and the inherent limits of such an anthropocentric approach to rights of nature.