I deas move in space and time. They swim like fish. They drift like pollen. They migrate like birds. Sometimes their movement carries them right around the world, and they find new niches in which to flourish.

One day in October 1971, a young academic called Christopher Stone was giving a seminar on property law at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It had been an intense class; the students were tired and distracted. Pens were being twirled, windows stared out of. Stone decided to have a last shot at regaining their interest. What he said then jolted the students upright—and it also surprised him. He hadn’t been expecting to say it.

“So,” he asked hesitantly, “what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like? A consciousness in which . . . nature had rights. Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals. How would such a posture in law affect a community’s view of itself?”

There was uproar from the students. How could a river have rights? How could a forest be a legal person? It would flood the courts with vexatious claims. It would be an affront to those humans who are still denied rights. Who would speak for the river in court—and how would they know what the river wanted? If a river could sue, could it be sued in return if it flooded a property? These were all good questions. One thing was for sure: Stone had got their attention.

Afterward, Stone couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened. Where had the idea come from? He couldn’t say. But he realized he really meant what he’d said. Rivers should have rights. Forests could be legal persons. He just didn’t know how yet. So he pulled out a yellow jotting pad and began to work it out.

Stone grew his idea fast: first into a 1972 paper called “Should Trees Have Standing?”—an essay now seen as a landmark in jurisprudence—and then into a book of the same name, which remains in print more than fifty years on. His idea initially met not only resistance but derision. Judges and lawyers heaped scorn upon it. Stone didn’t mind. He knew there was a price to pay—a phase of testing to be passed through—for any strong new notion.

“Each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new ‘entity,’” he wrote in his 1972 paper, each time the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for use by “us”—those who are holding rights at the time.

A lmost forty years after Stone first coined the notion of nature’s rights, a Maori legal scholar called Jacinta Ruru read his work. It struck her that an affinity existed between Stone’s young concept of legal personhood for natural entities and the long-standing Maori relationship with rivers as living, sacred ancestors.

In 2010, together with her student James Morris, Ruru published an article entitled........

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