WORKSHOP: GRASSROOTS CAMPAIGN STRATEGY FOR LEGAL RECOGNITION OF NON-HUMAN RELATIVES

Friday, May 6, 2022, 9:30 AM - 3:30 PM (PT)

The Centre for Law & the Environment (CLE) at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, in collaboration with the UBC Sustainability Initiative and the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), hosted an in-person training workshop for individuals and organizations from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities interested in enacting laws that respect and protect non-human beings like rivers, lakes, species and ecosystems. This workshop is the capstone event of a series of webinars in which attendees heard directly from people who have taken part in campaigns to achieve legal recognition of non-human relations in Canada and abroad, about why and how they pursued such recognition, what opportunities and obstacles they encountered and what lessons they learned.

Led by rights of nature pioneer Mari Margil of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, the workshop provided a full day of hands-on training in grassroots campaign strategy for participants who want to take action to advance legal recognition for non-human relations in their own communities. Participants explored past successes and failures, campaign goals and tactics, legal options for recognizing non-human relations, interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities and other issues. They also brainstormed and received feedback on their own efforts to enact or strengthen laws to respect and protect non-human relations.

Here are some photos from the workshop and the complementary side event, Re-Storying our Relations with the Natural World – Mother Nature Forest Walk:

To read more about this workshop, check out this blog post from Linda Nowlan, Senior Director, at UBC's Sustainability Hub.