S01:E03
A company can go to court. A river can’t. Brontie Ansell of Lawyers for Nature is working to change that — giving the natural world a voice in law, in policy, and even inside the company boardroom.
Brontie is a corporate solicitor and the Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature, a UK-based group of solicitors, barristers and academics who take on no human clients, because they treat nature itself as their client. It began, she says, with a coffee at a 2019 conference and a single thought: nobody speaks for the trees.
In this conversation we get into what a nature director actually does on a company board (she sat on the boards of Faith in Nature and House of Hackney), why company law holds so much unused “white space”, the River Standing Bill that could let a river be heard in court, Maidstone Borough Council’s new rights of nature framework, and Ecological Attribution Rights (EARs) — Brontie’s idea for giving a river a stake in the value it helps create.
This episode also opens with the more personal, foundational part of the conversation that’s normally reserved for Changing the Narrative members. It was too central to hold back, so this week it’s here for everyone.
As Brontie puts it: there’s never one answer, but there is always an answer.
Listen and read the full show notes at: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/giving-nature-a-voice-from-the-boardroom-to-the-courtroom Become a member and support the podcast at: https://content.changingthenarrative.media/#/portal/signup More on Lawyers for Nature: https://www.lawyersfornature.com/
Chapters: 00:00 Cold open 00:32 Introduction 03:08 Meet Brontie Ansell 03:28 Why company law? The white space nobody’s using 06:48 Do corporations have more rights than nature? 10:44 Why nature needs a voice in court: the guardian model 12:56 How Lawyers for Nature began 16:57 Are we waking up to being part of nature? 21:31 When a movement goes mainstream: the risk of greenwashing 23:42 Rewriting the dictionary: the We Are Nature campaign 24:13 Bottom-up or top-down? Nature on the board 27:42 When legislation works: the River Standing Bill 29:25 Maidstone: a council adopts a rights of nature framework 30:39 Open-sourcing the work, and refusing to gatekeep 34:09 Inside the boardroom: what a Nature Director actually does 38:06 From less harm to nature positivity 40:07 What they’re experimenting with next: Risks Beyond Human Eyes 45:21 The rabbit in the garden: Ecological Attribution Rights 50:00 One thing to take away: there’s always an answer 51:55 Outro