A cloud forest in northern Ecuador is protected from deforestation and mining after being recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood.
For more than 30 years, José DeCoux woke each morning to a deafening noise. In his home in Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest, monkeys squeal, squirrels scuffle, and 400 species of bird flit and squawk. A mist hangs in the trees, and ferns and mosses in countless shades of green cover every rock and tree trunk.
DeCoux moved to the Los Cedros reserve in northern Ecuador from the US in the 1980s. He was “sort of heeding the call to save the rainforest, or something”, he told BBC Future Planet with a smile in April.
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Its biodiversity is astonishing: more than 130 scientific papers have been published on the vast number of species that call Los Cedros home – from fungi and orchids to snails, jaguars and bears.
Most of the reserve is a cloud forest where the air is heavy with moisture from drenching rain and permanent condensation, which fosters blankets of lichen and strange orchids.
Life continues to thrive in Los Cedros, but its survival wasn’t always certain – and it is largely thanks to a powerful, and increasingly influential, global legal movement that the forest is still standing.
To quantify the impact of the court’s decision on Los Cedros, Rodríguez-Garavito has spent time in the area, speaking to scientists and other key actors, and observing the outcomes two years on from the ruling.
Gallant points out that, importantly, the rights of nature movement is a vehicle for Indigenous principles and priorities to have sway, and that these ideas are leading the rest of the world.
A recent ruling in Peru saw legal rights granted to the Mañón River, thanks to a lawsuit brought by Kukama Indigenous Women’s organization Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana (HKK) against the Peruvian state and oil company Petroperú.
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