Defending the Most Abused Ecosystems on the Planet
The Global Push for the Rights of Wetlands
Welcome to Truth and Reckoning, a newsletter from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). We are organizers, lawyers, and revolutionaries who educate and agitate to confront systemic injustice and restore humanity’s relationship with the Earth.
For more than 30 years, we’ve helped communities resist corporate power, reject regulatory false promises, and assert their right to self-governance grounded in ecological balance.
By Kai Huschke
In American culture, wetlands are akin to the “redheaded stepchild” of ecosystems. That antiquated and demeaning phrase reflects negative cultural attitudes, destructive behaviors, and harm-permitting legal structures regarding wetlands.
From the vantage of industrialists, wetlands are a nuisance which should be filled in for the sake of progress or destroyed when they are in an inappropriate location. These actions have resulted in the United States losing 50% of its original wetlands over the last 200 years.
On a global scale, planet Earth has lost 22% of its wetlands in just the last 50 years.
Why do wetlands matter? Wetlands are like the liver and kidneys for the planet. They store more carbon than any other ecosystem, filter and purify water, buffer against the impacts of flooding and wildfire, and host forty percent of all plants and animals by providing abundant food and lush habitats.
For the last five years, CELDF has been collaborating with an international coalition to advance legal rights of wetlands. As with other rights of nature efforts, this one is focused on changing our culture’s abusive relationship with wetlands to one based on right-relationship in order to halt wetland loss and restore those which have been destroyed.
Among a number of outcomes from this collaboration is a recent paper published in the peer-reviewed journal “Wetlands,” the journal of wetland science. The paper is titled “How Implementing the Rights of Wetlands Provides Benefits to People and Wetlands: Relationships, Rights, Responsibilities, Experiences, and Actions” and was authored by Gillian Davies, Ritesh Kumar, M. Siobhan Fennessy, Nick Davidson, Dave Pritchard, Matthew Simpson, Priyanie Amerasinghe, William R. Moomaw, Erin Okuno, Bethanie Walder, Chaturangi Wickramaratne, Rebecca Woodward, and myself, Kai Huschke.
The article discusses what rights for wetlands need to be recognized, the responsibilities of humans towards and with wetlands, the legal structures necessary to effectively implement and enforce wetland’s rights, and examples of the rights of wetlands in practice.
Here are two excerpts from the article:
“Existing approaches to conservation, restoration, and sustainable development have failed to shift the people-nature relationship or halt consumption-oriented human behaviour, which has led us to the brink of catastrophic climate destabilisation and brought on the 6th mass extinction (Cowie et al. 2022; Leakey and Lewin 1995). All of this is happening more rapidly than anticipated (Ceballos et al. 2015; IPCC 2023). We have little time left to change course and we must act now.”
“Upholding wetlands’ rights is more likely to occur when wetlands are understood as socio-ecological systems (Kumar et al. 2023), and when communities and individuals are engaged early in the process of planning and implementing wetland management strategies, as long-term success and sustainability are most likely when local communities are engaged and steward the wetland over time (McDonald and Gillespie 2024). As communities recognise themselves as members of the web of life and guardians of living nature, rather than owners of natural resources, they are empowered to become powerful defenders of wetlands’ legal rights (Reed et al. 2021).”
CELDF is proud to be involved in this work to protect the rights of wetlands and we hope it proves useful to communities, attorneys, activists, and lawmakers around the world who are working every day to defend their local wetlands from threats.
Kai Huschke has been a principal member of CELDF since 2009. After spending 13 years organizing for CELDF in the Northwest and Hawaii, Kai took over as Executive Director. His experience as a seasoned community organizer and movement specialist is helping to guide CELDF into its next 30 years.
Kai has served as a national lecturer for CELDF’s Democracy School and as a board member of the Oregon Community Rights Network and Washington Community Rights Network. He teaches, presents, and writes extensively on movement building, community rights, rights of nature, and the intersection of culture and law.