Joseph Bonasia

As the public waits upon the Army Corps of Engineers’ LOSOM report to learn just how much polluted water each coast will be get, The Last Duel is in theaters now. Interestingly, it provides an important perspective on our water problems.

This true story revolves around the rape of a noblewoman in 1386. Few women had the courage to go public about rape in the 14th century because it was a man’s world, and the odds of securing justice were stacked against them. But this brave woman did, and a trial ensued.

Back then, rape was not considered a crime against a married woman. Instead, as the film points out, it was viewed as a property crime against her husband, because legally speaking, that’s what a wife was, her husband’s property.

In 1852, the best-selling novel of the 19th century was published, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It depicted, of course, the immoral, unjust, terrible cruelties of slavery–of people being treated as the property of others.

Ms. Stowe did not sign the publishing contract for her landmark book. She didn’t have that right because in 1852, married women had no legal identity. Centuries after the time of The Last Duel, they were still regarded by law as the property of their husbands. Mr. Stowe signed the contract.

Back then, had you told people that women and people of color would one day serve in the nation’s highest elected offices, sit on the Supreme Court, or be CEOs of giant corporations, they would have called you crazy. In 2021, of course, we cannot fathom how people could have seen other people as property, resulting in such terrible suffering.

But when it comes to nature, it might as well be centuries ago, because culturally and legally, we still regard nature as mere property just as we did back then.

Law divides the world into two categories: persons, capable of possessing rights; and property, unable to possess rights. Thus, in the eyes of the law, a dolphin has no more rights than a toaster. Nor do ecosystems such as the Everglades. Nor does Earth, beautiful and wondrous, singular in its ability to sustain life as we know it.

The notion that nature is something other than property is, for some people, hard to grasp. Its fine for corporations, which have long been legally recognized as persons, to have an extensive list of rights, but not nature. Perhaps it threatens their sense of the cultural and legal status quo.

But the status quo has produced the awful environmental crises in which we find ourselves.

Here in Florida, over half of our 4,393 waterways are polluted, meaning they are polluted or suffering reduced flow. Close to 1,000 manatees have starved to death this year because our polluted water has killed the seagrass they feed upon. There are 9,000 miles of streams and rivers designated for recreation that are impaired with fecal bacteria.

Exacerbated red tides, blue-green algae blooms, arguing over how much polluted water one side of the state gets compared to the other: this is not what living sustainably on a planet we are borrowing from our children looks like.

Current law, stacked as it is against nature, as it once was stacked against women and people of color, is a large part of the problem.

Grant waterways the legally recognized right to exist, flow, and be free of pollution — level the legal playing field between corporate polluters and nature — and we can stop arguing over who gets how much polluted water and start preventing pollution in the first place, which LOSOM doesn’t do.

We must change how we regard nature, the way we needed to change how we once regarded women and people of color. Legally recognizing their rights made a world of difference in correcting how the sexes and races related to one another.

This is the aim of Rights of Nature laws–to make a sustainable world of difference in our relationship with the natural world — because our current relationship, governed by archaic cultural and legal paradigms, benefits neither us nor nature.

It was inevitable that people of color and women would win the rights they needed and deserved. Rights of nature laws are inevitable, too, and the sooner we get them the better.

Those who think otherwise are on the wrong side of history.

— Cape Coral resident Joseph Bonasia is Vice-Chair of the Florida Rights of Nature Network and a founding board member of the SWFL RESET Center.