Rights of Nature in the United States: An Empirical Analysis of Local Legal Adoption

The authors present the first comprehensive empirical analysis of rights of nature (RoN) adoption in the United States, a globally growing legal movement asserting that rivers, forests, and ecosystems should be holders of rights. Although RoN is often theorized as a globally emergent, biocentric legal innovation, accounts of its U.S. diffusion remain sparse. The authors analyze all U.S. RoN efforts from 2002 to 2024 and integrate them with county-level social and environmental pollution indicators. The analytic strategy proceeds in three stages: (1) descriptive comparisons between RoN and non-RoN counties, (2) analysis of pollution violation intensity to assess RoN links to environmental burden, and (3) hierarchical clustering to assess RoN county heterogeneity. Contrary to existing scholarship that found U.S. RoN to be overwhelmingly white and conservative, the authors find that RoN ordinances arise in diverse sociopolitical and demographic contexts. The authors also find no link of RoN arising in geographies with heightened pollution violations. Thus, this analysis suggests that RoN adoption, despite its immediate legal radicality, has widespread local appeal in the United States. This breadth of relevance raises important contemporary challenges for sociology and points toward new directions for theorizing legal standing beyond the human.