In Ecuador, Indigenous groups’ use of ‘legal rights’ to save protected forest is inspiring others
The Los Cedros Protective Forest is at the forefront of a global movement rooted in the Indigenous belief that the environment has intrinsic rights.
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Jose Martín Ovando suddenly halts in his tracks and crouches down along the steep forest path shrouded in mist. He pulls out a magnifying glass from his small backpack to inspect a clump of deep green moss.
Among the greenery, he has spotted an orchid: Dracula morleyi. Blotted in black with a flash of white at the center, it’s barely bigger than a fingernail. “This place is full of so much biodiversity,” he grins. “Scientists don’t even know about most of it.”
Ovando is a guide at Los Cedros Protective Forest, a 4,800-hectare (11,860-acre) cloud forest reserve in the northwest Ecuadorian Andes, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas.
This tropical haven – home to a wealth of wildlife, including the critically endangered black-and-chestnut eagle and brown-headed spider monkey, jaguars, endemic frogs, more than 300 species of birds, 600 kinds of moths, and 200 varieties of orchids – is at the forefront of a global movement to recognise the legal rights of the natural world.
The movement is rooted in the common Indigenous belief that nature – from the Andean mountains to Amazonian rivers to a single soldier ant – is a system to which human beings belong and with which they must harmoniously coexist. The legal theory argues that these ecosystems and species...
