Challenging Corporate “Personhood”: Energy Companies and the “Rights” of Non‐Humans

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the idea of “rights” for nature has gained increasing traction among environmental activists throughout the Americas. Drawing on a series of recent legal cases in the state of Pennsylvania, this article tracks the efforts of a U.S.‐based nongovernmental organization to use such rights in ongoing struggles against energy companies involved in natural gas extraction. The central argument is that, despite their considerable philosophical and practical difficulties, the rights of nature are being productively used as part of a grassroots movement of civil disobedience that aims to simultaneously challenge corporate personhood and reestablish the power of local communities to defend the rights of ecosystems within their jurisdictions. By explicitly juxtaposing the “rights” of nature with the “rights” of corporate persons, local communities facing the impacts of natural gas extraction are attempting not only to make substantive claims about the legal defensibility of nonhuman rights but also, just as importantly, to set precedents for the revocation of corporate personhood. Close attention to these arguments suggests ways of bringing together recent work on corporate personhood with theoretical insights drawn from political ontology.

Science and the legal rights of nature

“…A few local rights-of-nature laws have been overturned by courts for violating state laws or the US Constitution. However, the reason for most of these negative rulings was that many of these laws, which were drafted with the aid of an NGO, were intended as "civil disobedience" (35). They frequently purported to supersede state law and strip corporations of legal personhood (35), and thus were in conflict with the US or state legal systems.…”

The ‘rights of nature’ in an age of white supremacy?

“…Similar charter amendments have been passed in more than 200 municipalities across the country, and in many cases, they have already been directly challenged by both state governments and affected corporations in U.S. courts. While the scholarship on these efforts is robust and growing (see, for example, Tanasescu, 2015;Youatt, 2020;Kauffman and Martin, 2021;Fitz-Henry, 2018, there has thus far been little attention to the specific organizing tactics and strategies used by these activists in the United States. This is a serious omission because, as noted above, pointed critiques have been raised in recent years in relation to movements for the rights of naturespecifically, about the ways in which racism of various kinds remains embedded in the architecture of rights languages, both implicitly and explicitly.…”

“…Similar charter amendments have been passed in more than 200 municipalities across the country, and in many cases, they have already been directly challenged by both state governments and affected corporations in U.S. courts. While the scholarship on these efforts is robust and growing (see, for example, Tanasescu, 2015; Youatt, 2020; Kauffman and Martin, 2021; Fitz-Henry, 2018, 2021), there has thus far been little attention to the specific organizing tactics and strategies used by these activists in the United States.…”

“…Without these rights, Stone argued, no one who was not directly affected by environmental pollution or other forms of environmental destruction would have the standing to challenge state and corporate prerogatives in U.S. courts (Stone, 1972). Some 40 years later, in the context of the rapidly deepening climate crisis alongside an equally challenging crisis of corporate 'personhood' in the United States (Fitz-Henry, 2018;Kirsch, 2014), Stone's ideas have acquired a second life among scholars influenced by post-humanism and post-materialism, lawyers of earth jurisprudence and legal pluralism, and leading activist organizations, including Movement Rights and the Earth Law Center in the United States, the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature in Ecuador, and the Australian Earth Laws Alliance in Australia.…”

Global extractive imperative: from local resistance to unburnable fuels

“…While the extractive imperative in Latin America took shape in a very particular set of circumstances, similar dynamics can be observed in a variety of other contexts, making it possible to speak of a 'global extractive imperative'. The global extractive imperative has been discussed in the literature in a variety of different settings, including Turkey (Adaman et al, 2017), India (Adhikari and Chhotray, 2020), Brazil (Saes and Bisht, 2020), sub-Saharan Africa (Klosek, 2018), and, perhaps surprisingly, the United States (Fitz-Henry, 2018, Kojola, 2019.…”