Mud squelched underfoot as we walked through the mossy trails of Parco dell’Orecchiella, high in the Tuscan Apennines. My companion and I moved carefully, stepping over twisted tree roots and marshy pools of rain-fed water, the aftershocks of a recent storm evident in a felled tree across our path. I reached out a hand and helped her over, pausing, sermon-like, in the quiet hush of the woods.
I gave her an amicus curiae brief of my own making—crafted not for a court, but for the conscience. “All other avenues have been exhausted,” I said. “The law may be the last line of defence.” And in this moment, deep in the forest, that wasn’t an abstraction. It was truth.
As a lawyer now in my 70s, the stakes feel sharper, the causes clearer. For decades I’ve walked alongside the underdog—be they migrant, misfit, or mother earth. From the parched plains of Patagonia to the thick silence of the Amazon, I have seen the slow death of ecosystems and the casual brutality of those who plunder with impunity. I lived the danger firsthand in the chaos surrounding the John Buckley kidnapping in Ecuador, where power and money always seem to find their way around the rules.
But nature, long voiceless, is now finding its advocates. Monica Feria-Tinta is one of them—and in many ways, my kindred spirit. Like me, she is both lawyer and exile. We both carry our origins in our bones, but our legal passions into the world’s remote corners.
Her moment came in 2020, when she was called to advise on a case in Ecuador’s Los Cedros forest—a magical expanse of nearly 12,000 acres, home to a symphony of life: orchids and jaguars, rare snails and invisible fungi. No people lived there—no human community to plead displacement. But Ecuador, remarkable among nations, had enshrined the rights of nature in its 2008 constitution. And for once, the forest itself was the plaintiff!!
Monica stepped in not to represent one side, but to inform the court as amicus curiae. Her brief asked the essential question: If corporations and robots are granted legal personhood in Europe, why not forests? Why not rivers?
In December 2021, Ecuador’s constitutional court delivered a thunderclap of a ruling. The rights of nature were not poetic gestures but binding legal obligations. The forest had won. Not because it had owners. Because it had life.
The global ripple of that decision has reached Bangladesh, where rivers have been granted the same legal rights as humans; New Zealand, where the Whanganui River is a legal person; and, astonishingly, even Lewes in East Sussex. There, Monica helped draft a charter for the River Ouse—one polluted and ignored for years. In February 2025, the local council granted it eight specific rights: the right to flow, to be free from pollution, to thrive.
It’s not binding yet. But it’s a beginning. A reminder that change doesn’t just flow from legislatures, but from ideas—bold, ancient, and often Indigenous. As Feria-Tinta writes, “The Earth is a single, interconnected organism.” It’s not some romantic slogan—it’s the most logical, legal argument of our time.
So, I walked with my friend through Orecchiella, preaching like a prophet with mud on my boots. This is not nostalgia. This is urgency. The forests I walked in Argentina are being stripped. The rivers I drank from in the Andes are drying. The Amazon I feared for during John Buckley’s ordeal now fears us more than ever.
In the face of right-wing denialism, media complicity, and legal apathy, we must defend the rule of law like a lifeline. Because it is. I’ve learned that dictatorship will teach you the value of law the hard way. And I’ve learned that sometimes the only way to save what we love is to go to court and let the trees speak.
My friend got it. That glint in her eye. That click in her soul. She’ll go, I know, like an apostle of an earthbound gospel—carrying the quiet roar of forests into boardrooms, classrooms, maybe even courtrooms.
Let the judges roll their eyes. Let the rivers keep flowing.
We are lawyers. We are witnesses. And we will not rest until nature is heard.
