I am a barrister, Founder of Lawyers for Nature and a leading UK campaigner for the Rights of Nature. I am also an advocate of nature guardianship, after becoming a guardian of the River Roding, where I live on a boat in East London.

Rights of Nature is a rapidly growing worldwide movement to give legal rights, legal personhood and self-ownership to the natural world. It has been pioneered by indigenous people who have never accepted the Western idea that nature is a dead resource to be used solely for human ends.

In this Fellowship, I will be visiting rivers, forests and mountains that have been awarded their rights to find out exactly what was done, how it was achieved and the practical differences it has made. I will then bring this learning back to the UK and attempt to translate these ideas of Rights of Nature into the legal, political and economic systems of our industrialised society.