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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

rights of nature earth jurisprudence legal personhood environmental governance environmental sociology nonhuman rights

Since its inception, sociology has defined itself by policing the boundary between human and nonhuman life, repeatedly reinventing the terms of exclusion in order to secure the field’s distinct analytic domain (Bryant and Farrell 2024; Cerulo 2009; Jerolmack and Tavory 2014). For Weber (1947), it was consciousness, for Goffman (1959) intentionality, and for Habermas (1971) language that determined who and what deserves analytic standing within the field. But of course, sociology is not radical in this regard, but rather embedded within an older Western tradition and more recent Enlightenment humanism that implicitly treats humans as separate and above the rest of creation (Bryant and Farrell 2023).

However, over the past few decades social scientific challenges have routinely exposed tensions in this tradition. For instance, actor-network theory (ANT) disrupts anthropocentrism by granting analytical parity to heterogeneous “actants” (Callon 1984; Latour 1993), while social constructivism shows how humans routinely confer social relevance onto nonhumans through projection, intersubjectivity, and situational constraint, undermining assumptions that meaning-making is exclusively human (Farrell 2015; Greider and Garkovich 1994). Yet both approaches face critiques: ANT risks flattening ontologies and constructivism reinscribes humans as the ultimate source of social significance, in a way reinforcing the same stance of previous generations (Jerolmack and Tavory 2014). More recent attempts to reestablish the centrality of nonhumans in the field include Jerolmack and Tavory’s (2014) pragmatic model, which demonstrates how nonhumans shape our social self; Bargheer’s (2018) work, which theorizes how nonhumans act as relational actors that structure social practices, sensory attention, and moral orientation; Scoville’s (2019, 2022) work, which shows how nonhuman actors might reorganize political conflict, legal reasoning, and knowledge production across environmental governance domains; and even more recent work by Ahmad (2026) outlining methods for including nonhumans as interview subjects in sociological study. These theoretical developments open important avenues, but they remain primarily discursive.

In contrast, the rights of nature (RoN) movement represents a juridical intervention that seeks to inscribe the nonhuman into the very grammar of legality. Rather than emerging as a sociological theory, RoN arises as a legal object and political strategy that challenges the human/nonhuman boundary not through conceptual reframing but through institutional codification (Borràs 2016). Since Stone’s (1972) provocation, “Should Trees Have Standing?”, RoN has evolved into a transnational legal movement comprising more than 600 initiatives across diverse jurisdictions. RoN efforts seek to endow rivers, forests, species, ecosystems, and “nature” writ large with legal personhood, embedding biocentric claims within the bureaucratic authority of the state (EJM 2025 ; Kauffman 2024; Stone 2010). In this sense, RoN operates not simply as a novel legal category but as a material instantiation of long-standing sociological efforts to reimagine agency, obligation, and authority across the human-nonhuman divide.

While the U.S. is one of the most active RoN jurisdictions in the world by absolute count, it remains poorly understood empirically: nearly all U.S. activity has unfolded at the county and municipal level through a decentralized, organizationally thin structure that resists the kind of national-scale analysis that has made cases such as Ecuador and New Zealand tractable objects of study (Kauffman and Martin 2018; Putzer et al. 2022). The existing U.S. literature, though generative, rests on a small number of cases and has yet to systematically examine the full demographic, political, and environmental landscape of RoN adoption across American communities (Kohl 2024; Kohl and Walenta 2023).

It is this gap that motivates the analysis of our guiding question: Where and why is the concept of “rights of nature” being institutionalized at the municipal level in U.S. counties, and what does this reveal about the changing moral and sociological status of nonhuman entities in contemporary governance?

The existing empirical accounts of U.S. RoN, though limited, have converged on a relatively narrow characterization of these communities as overwhelmingly white and surprisingly conservative (Kohl and Walenta 2023). At the same time, accounts in other national contexts have shown clear linkages between RoN initiatives and acute environmental harm (Kauffman and Martin 2017). Yet these claims rest on small samples and limited comparative leverage, leaving open fundamental questions about the demographic breadth, political character, and environmental correlates of RoN adoption across U.S. counties. Whether RoN communities share a single profile or represent multiple demographic contexts in the United States remains unexplored.

To begin addressing this question, we focus on county-level RoN ordinances in the United States, which represent the most localized form of legal authority within the U.S. federal-state-local hierarchy. Because counties legislate only within powers delegated by their states, analyzing RoN activity at this level allows us to examine how these ordinances emerge as localized interventions within a broader national legal structure. We build on the most trusted and publicly available data source that contains information on RoN (the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor [EJM]) and add to it important social, political, and ecological data (e.g., demographic measures from the American Community Survey and presidential election returns from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab) to produce a substantially more comprehensive basis for examining patterns in where and how these ordinances emerge.

Given that the primary aim of this study is sociological table-setting, our analytic approach is descriptive and proceeds in three stages, each corresponding to an open empirical question in the literature. First, to assess the claim that RoN adoption is demographically narrow, we situate adopting counties relative to the national baseline using descriptive statistics and distributional comparisons across key demographic, political, and environmental indicators. Second, to evaluate whether RoN functions as a response to acute pollution burden, we overlay RoN counties with environmental regulatory data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Third, to examine whether adopting counties are homogenous or heterogenous in profile, we use hierarchical clustering using Ward’s minimum-variance method to identify patterned heterogeneity among RoN jurisdictions.

Previewing our results, we find that U.S. counties adopting RoN are not marked by heightened environmental conflict or enforcement at the nation-state level, a phenomenon often observed in Ecuadorian contexts around mining and drilling (Kauffman and Martin 2017), nor do they reflect the demographic or political uniformity described in recent U.S. based RoN studies (e.g., Kohl and Walenta 2023). Instead, RoN counties exhibit, on average, a centrist political stance with only a slight Democratic lean. They span a broad spectrum of racial compositions, socioeconomic profiles, environmental amenity levels, and pollution enforcement intensities. Furthermore, cluster analysis reveals no singular profile but rather multiple distinct typologies of RoN counties, ranging from highly educated urbanized liberal enclaves to low-capacity rural jurisdictions. This heterogeneity complicates dominant portrayals of RoN as either a uniformly radical ecological intervention or an initiative confined to “overwhelmingly white” and conservative communities (Kohl and Walenta 2023), a finding especially important given the typically white and homogenous coalitions associated with the American conservation movement (i.e., Pellow 2018; Taylor 2016). Instead, our findings suggest that RoN spans across a far more heterogeneous set of communities that articulate a wide breadth of different aims, setting the stage for further sociological research to come.

With this destination in mind, this study aims to clarify the empirical contours of RoN in the United States, providing a baseline map of where and how these claims emerge in order to support more sustained sociological inquiry into this evolving legal and political phenomenon. Below, we proceed by first situating RoN within sociological debates on nonhuman agency and authority, and within the broader literature on rights and legal personhood, before turning to the data, methods, and empirical analysis of RoN adoption across U.S. counties.

Literature Review

Nonhumans in the Legal Process

At first glance, extending rights or standing to nonhumans seems like a dramatic break with the Western liberal legal tradition, which since the Enlightenment has centered the individual human as the basic unit of legal personhood. Yet that same tradition draws a decisive line between the “human person” and the “legal person,” a distinction that has long cracked the door for nonhuman entities to acquire standing, special protections, and enforceable capacities within Western legal orders.

Consider first the domain of wildlife and animal protection. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 “establishes protections for fish, wildlife, and plants that are listed as threatened or endangered,” granting them safeguards that exceed those afforded to ordinary, healthy populations. Likewise, most countries now maintain animal-cruelty statutes that impose affirmative duties on humans and recognize certain animals as holders of legally protectable interests (Koop-Monteiro, Stoddart, and Tindall 2023; Whitley, Kalof, and Flach 2021). It is in this context that some legal scholars describe animals as “quasi-persons,” marking a partial but notable extension of legal consideration to nonhuman life. For instance, in a high-profile 2022 case, New York’s highest court rejected a lawsuit seeking to free Happy, an Asian elephant at the Bronx Zoo, by recognizing her as a person. By a 5–2 vote, the court held that habeas corpus relief was unavailable to Happy because, in the court’s view, an elephant is not a “person” under the law (Holden 2024). Although the New York case failed, other legal decisions in Ecuador and Pakistan have held the opposite conclusion: that animals are “sentient beings” with legally enforceable rights (Franceschini and Stilt 2025).

Maritime law offers an even older example of nonhuman entities occupying a distinctive legal status in the West: ships have long been treated as quasi-autonomous actors capable of being sued, mortgaged, or held liable in rem (Veal, Tsimplis, and Serdy 2019). Although not “persons” in any moral or anthropological sense, vessels function as procedural subjects whose legally recognized agency complicates any strict human-nonhuman boundary in Western jurisprudence. And of course, in the United States, corporations extend this logic further by formalizing a fully articulated legal personality that exists independently of their human constituents. As juridical persons empowered to own property, enter contracts, and assert constitutional claims—including, after Citizens United v. FEC, robust First Amendment political-speech rights—corporations illustrate how Western law routinely attributes standing and agency to nonhuman entities when doing so stabilizes economic and political order (Pollman 2011). We might also think of trusts, estates of the dead, certain state-designated aircraft, and municipalities such as cities, counties, and public districts, all of which possess forms of legal standing, including the capacity to sue and be sued.

These examples underscore a point that sociological theory cannot ignore: Western legal systems routinely distribute agency, rights, and obligations to entities that are neither human nor conscious, yet that nonetheless shape collective life in consequential ways via delegated rational-legal authority (Weber, Roth, and Wittich 1922). Whether or not we “theorize” such actors as persons, their legally conferred capacities structure markets, governance, and, as Scoville (2019) showed, novel forms of social and coalitional potential. In this sense, any account of social order in our modern bureaucratic society that restricts agency to human subjects risks missing how decisively nonhuman actors intervene in the sociopolitical process. To return to a question above anew: What if a community gives a river legal standing as a rights-bearing being, just as we have corporations, ships, and animals?

Rights and the Rights of Nature

Although rights often appear as universal moral claims or neutral legal instruments, sociological scholarship emphasizes their historical mutability and political ambivalence. Rather than merely recognizing preexisting moral subjects, rights operate as epistemic tools and political technologies that actively produce personhood, boundaries, and social order. Historically, rights have been mobilized from above to legitimate domination, as colonial empires and liberal founding projects alike deployed universalist rights language to justify imperial jurisdiction, racial hierarchy, and gendered exclusion (Coleman 2023; Hunt 2008; Moyn 2014).

At the same time, rights have been repeatedly resignified “from below” (Borras and Franco 2013), as enslaved peoples, Indigenous nations, and marginalized communities have appropriated rights discourse to contest exclusion, expose state violence, and assemble alternative political worlds (Coleman 2023). Taken together, these contradictory deployments reveal rights as mutable social technologies that organize state power while expressing deeper ontological commitments about life, value, and legitimate forms of relationality (Sindoni 2025; Wynter 2003). It is within this ambivalent genealogy that RoN emerges, inheriting the paradox of rights as both instruments of enclosure and vehicles of emancipation while extending personhood beyond the human. Understanding RoN therefore requires situating it not as a novel legal innovation but as part of an ongoing struggle over personhood, sovereignty, and the kinds of worlds that rights are capable of bringing into being.

Today, the RoN movement refers to the nearly 600 initiatives across the world to recognize rivers, forests, ecosystems, and “nature” more broadly as bearers of rights within state-sanctioned legal systems. These experiments range from local ordinances to constitutional reforms at the national level (Kauffman and Martin 2021). They are often framed as a global response to converging ecological crises and injustice such as climate change, mining, and deforestation, and are widely celebrated for their potential to shift dominant anthropocentric legal orders toward more biocentric ones (Boyd 2017; Gordon 2019; Kahui, Armstrong, and Aanesen 2024; Rühs and Jones 2016). Mainstream overviews emphasize RoN as a global legal innovation, often connected to highly visible actors and platforms such as the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, and the Earth Law Center (Kauffman and Martin 2017). This work has been crucial for cataloging where RoN is being adopted and how it is designed, and for situating RoN within broader debates on legal pluralism and environmental personhood (e.g., Kahui et al. 2024; Kinkaid 2019; Youatt 2017).

But, as some scholars have noted, RoN does not operate as a single coherent project (Kinkaid 2019; Sindoni 2025). In Ecuador, constitutional recognition of the rights of Pachamama is closely tied to Indigenous movements for Buen Vivir and struggles over oil, mining, and forests, with courts gradually experimenting with how RoN can reconfigure property and development priorities (Kauffman and Martin 2017, 2023; Tănăsescu 2013, 2020). In Aotearoa New Zealand, legal personhood for entities such as the Whanganui River and Te Urewera emerged from long genealogies of Māori law and political struggle, acting as a shield against full settler legal rule of land (Geddis and Ruru 2019; Tănăsescu 2020). Existing scholarship has productively mapped this diversity, with a strong focus on legal operations, ontological assumptions, Indigenous engagements, and entanglements with international geopolitics (e.g., Boyd 2017; Guzmán 2019; Kinkaid 2019; Rühs and Jones 2016; Tănăsescu 2020; Youatt 2017). A growing critical literature, especially in geography and political ecology, further complicates this picture, arguing that RoN emerged from Christian American environmental ethics (Earth Jurisprudence and Wild Law) that set forth a universalized “earth community,” flattening differences and reproducing colonial Western legal and theological imaginaries (Berry 2014; Rawson and Mansfield 2018; Stone 1972). The vast majority of empirical work on RoN operates at one of two scales: in-depth analysis of nationally visible cases such as Ecuador or New Zealand, or sweeping cross-national inventories that catalogue legal initiatives through document coding and geospatial taxonomy (Kahui et al. 2024; Putzer et al. 2022). Across both, what makes RoN empirically tractable is the legibility of its paper trail, constitutional provisions, court decisions, and ordinances that can be readily coded, mapped, and compared across national jurisdictions.

The United States presents a strikingly different and comparatively understudied landscape. In the absence of any federal or constitutional RoN provision, nearly all U.S. activity has unfolded at the county and municipal level, scattered across a complex federalist system in which state, county, and local governments exercise distinct and sometimes competing forms of legal authority. The bulk of early U.S. RoN initiatives (2002–2016) were organized primarily through a single coordinating organization (the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund) and the local residents it mobilized through its “Democracy Schools,” a structure quite distinct from the pluralist coalitions that drove RoN in Ecuador or the Māori-led parliamentary negotiations that characterized New Zealand (Kauffman and Martin 2018, 2021). In the United States, RoN took a distinctive framing as “a way to defend local democracy,” resonant across both liberal and conservative communities (Kauffman and Martin 2018), articulating “rights for nature” alongside “human rights to a clean environment” as an explicit check on corporate power over local governance (Kohl 2024; Kohl and Walenta 2023). This scholarship argues that the U.S. RoN ordinances often function less as radical reconfigurations of legal personhood and more as rebranded tools of community self-determination, mobilizing the language of nature’s rights to protect local democratic control against extractive industry and corporate preemption (Kohl 2024; Kohl and Walenta 2023). In any case, with at least 129 documented initiatives since 2002, the United States represents one of the most active RoN jurisdictions in the world by absolute count (Putzer et al. 2022), yet one whose dynamics remain mostly understood through comparative political theory or preliminary geospatial visualization (Kauffman and Martin 2018, 2021; Putzer et al. 2022).

In the most systematic U.S.-focused empirical study to date, Kohl and Walenta (2023) find that RoN-adopting communities are “overwhelmingly white” and surprisingly conservative, interpreting this as evidence that non-Indigenous U.S. RoN operates less as a biocentric or decolonial project and more as an extension of existing environmental priorities shaped by the racial and class composition of adopting communities. On their account, whiteness operates not just as a demographic descriptor but as an index to a particular relationship to environmental amenities, property claims, and civic infrastructure, one in which “nature” worth protecting is already legible within dominant cultural frames (Kohl 2024). Relatedly, income and socioeconomic capacity may independently condition which communities can pursue legal experimentation in the first place. Drafting ordinances, organizing public support, navigating legal challenges, and sustaining campaigns against well-resourced corporate or governmental opposition all require civic infrastructure, legal knowledge, and financial resources that are unevenly distributed across U.S. communities. On this account, RoN adoption may reflect not just who cares about nature, but who has the institutional capacity to act on that care through formal legal channels, a dynamic that implicates class as much as race in shaping the movement’s geography.

Yet both of these claims remain underexamined. Kohl and Walenta’s (2023) analysis draws on a limited number of cases, and no study has systematically assessed whether the demographic and socioeconomic profile they describe holds across the full population of U.S. RoN efforts. This matters because RoN simultaneously mobilizes two of the most complex and contested terrains in modern legal and political thought (rights and nature), each carrying long histories in liberalism, colonialism, and environmental struggle (Braun 1997; Williams 1982; Wynter 2003). Before sociology can assess whether RoN represents a genuine rupture in the U.S. legal order or a repackaging of existing hierarchies, we need a clearer picture of the concrete sites, actors, and political economies from which these experiments arise. This article provides that foundation.

Data

This study draws on publicly available data from the EJM, the most comprehensive and authoritative dataset currently available on the global emergence of earth jurisprudence, the broad umbrella term for laws that aim to prioritize nature. Maintained by the EJM research collective, the dataset systematically documents legal efforts to recognize the rights of ecosystems and nonhuman entities across multiple jurisdictions and legal scales. As of December 2025, the EJM includes nearly 600 distinct initiatives across the world between 1969 to 2025. These data include initiatives on “Rights of Nature, environmental personhood, Earth Law, Wild Law, policy informed by biocentric governance, as well as Indigenous law, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and other non-Western legal traditions” in more than 40 countries, including the United States, Ecuador, New Zealand, Colombia, Bolivia, and India, to name a few. These include both legally binding instruments and formalized symbolic or declaratory actions. Each initiative (or observation in the dataset) includes the jurisdiction, year of passage, legal form, and geographic location of each initiative, along with descriptive information on the ecosystems or entities recognized and the legal rationale invoked. The EJM is widely regarded as the gold-standard reference for empirical research on earth jurisprudence, providing the most complete and curated record of RoN activity available to date.

For the purposes of this analysis, we focus exclusively on RoN claims¹ arising within the United States. Unlike countries such as Ecuador or Bolivia, where RoN have been recognized at the constitutional or national level, the United States has not adopted any such initiatives federally. As a result, nearly all U.S. RoN activity occurs at the county and municipal levels (see the Supplemental Material for an overview) with a small number of notable efforts emerging at the state level. Our filtered dataset includes 129 distinct initiatives spanning from 2002 to 2024. These 129 initiatives are distributed across approximately 80 unique counties, representing a small fraction of the more than 3,100 counties in the United States. This underscores that RoN remains a rare phenomenon in absolute terms, even as it spans a wider range of social and political contexts than previously documented. Furthermore, records capture RoN initiatives regardless of whether they were ultimately approved by legislatures or upheld by courts, as our analysis is concerned less with legal outcomes than with the social, political, and spatial conditions under which such claims are articulated and where they arise.

Finally, although our dataset includes both Indigenous-led and non-Indigenous-led U.S. RoN, we do not treat them differently in our analysis. Although we recognize the important distinctions between these initiatives, especially in the nuances of federal Indian law and decolonization efforts, such nuance falls outside of the scope of this article. Nonetheless we address this important limitation and the need for sovereignty-attentive research in our discussion.

Method

Our analytic strategy proceeds in three steps. First, we use descriptive comparisons to assess how counties that have adopted RoN ordinances differ from nonadopting counties across key demographic, political, and environmental indicators. Second, we examine whether RoN adoption is associated with elevated pollution exposure by overlaying RoN counties with population-adjusted EPA enforcement data. Third, focusing only on adopting counties, we use hierarchical clustering to develop a typology of RoN jurisdictions, highlighting patterned variation in social, political, and ecological contexts.

Descriptive Comparisons

We complete a series of descriptive comparisons to evaluate how RoN counties differ against the national baseline across a suite of relevant social, political, and ecological indicators. Variables included racial composition, educational attainment, median household income, partisan vote share in recent presidential elections (2008–2020), environmental desirability,² and land use. Racial composition and income address Kohl and Walenta’s (2023) characterization of RoN communities as overwhelmingly white and vote share captures their finding of a conservative lean. Educational attainment serves as a proxy for civic and institutional capacity. Environmental desirability, measured through the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Amenities Index, allows us to assess whether RoN tracks the Western conservationist tendency to privilege “exceptional” over “ordinary” nature (Cronon 1996; Farrell 2020). Land use provides additional context on the material landscapes in which RoN emerges.

These metrics were retrieved from publicly available datasets, including the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab, and the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. For each variable, we computed summary statistics and visualized distributional differences using histograms and kernel density plots. This allowed us to assess whether RoN counties cluster along particular social, environmental, or political lines relative to the national baseline. These comparisons offer an initial empirical grounding for understanding the profile of jurisdictions where RoN claims tend to emerge.

Environmental Enforcement Overlays

To assess whether RoN efforts tend to emerge in areas with heightened pollutant exposure and high-profile environmental harm, we incorporate data from the EPA’s Enforcement and Compliance History Online database, which provides systematic information on formal enforcement actions taken against polluting facilities violating federal environmental statutes. These include nationally applicable federal laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, and more. Violations of these acts are important documentations of polluting offenses that are institutionally recognized, legally actionable, and often subject to public scrutiny and mobilization. Although we believe that this represents some of the best possible data on consequential pollution events.

However, we recognize that these data have two primary limitations. First, EPA enforcement data captures pollution conflict as it registers at the federal level. Because the United States operates under a federalist structure in its environmental governance schemes and beyond, a large quantity of politically consequential conflict occurs at state, county, and municipal levels (i.e., Byrne et al. 2007; Haseloff 2024). Such local political conflict over pollution, which includes resistance to extractive industries, lobbying by industrial actors, and grassroots environmental mobilization, often does not produce federal enforcement actions to be socially and politically significant. As such, our measure here should be understood as an indicator of federally visible regulatory burden, not as a comprehensive proxy for all local political conflict around environmental harm. Second, even within the domain of federally tracked pollution, enforcement actions make visible only environmental harms that rise to the threshold of federal action, necessarily omitting everyday emissions from automobiles, non-point source agricultural runoff, or locally significant but unregulated contaminants. Some pollution is also ignored by the state entirely, or never made “legible” for state eyes (Scott 1998), often disproportionately affecting marginalized or frontline communities where monitoring, reporting, and regulatory follow-through are inconsistent or absent (Konisky and Reenock 2018).

These limitations point toward a broader methodological gap in the field: comparable, systematic measures of localized pollution conflict do not yet exist at the scale necessary for a nationwide analysis of the kind we undertake here. Constructing such measures, which would include drawing on state enforcement records, industry lobbying data, the presence of extractive industries, and local mobilization histories, represents a critical unmet need in the empirical study of environmental governance, and an important direction for future scholarship concerning RoN and beyond. In the meantime, we treat federal EPA enforcement data as a proxy for some of the most high-profile, institutionally visible pollution events in the United States, while acknowledging that state and local pollution dynamics are likely essential to a fuller account of where and why RoN emerges.

While considering these limitations, we move forward and identify all EPA enforcement actions from 2000 to 2020 spatially located within county boundaries (N = 100,270).³ Unsurprisingly, urban counties exhibit higher raw counts of enforcement actions because of greater population density and industrial activity. To account for this, we compute a population-adjusted enforcement rate for each county (number of enforcement actions per 10,000 residents), enabling more meaningful comparison across counties of varying size and urbanization level. We then compare these pollution enforcement rates between RoN and non-RoN counties, visualizing the results to identify broader spatial and structural patterns. Although this analysis does not establish causal relationships, it offers insight into whether the regulatory visibility of environmental harm is associated with the emergence of RoN ordinances, understanding from the outset that such visibility captures only one dimension of a more complex and locally variable pollution landscape.

Hierarchical Clustering of RoN Counties

Hierarchical clustering analysis was restricted to RoN counties only, as the goal was not to distinguish adopting from nonadopting counties, but to identify distinct kinds of RoN counties. We selected a small set of theoretically motivated county-level indicators common to related sociological analysis: total population, median household income, percentage non-Hispanic white, and percentage college educated. This variable set was chosen to capture the dimensions along which the literature has most strongly characterized the social profile of RoN communities, while remaining parsimonious enough for stable clustering at the available sample size.

We also included in our model data from the Natural Amenities Index, which is a county-level measure developed by the Department of Agriculture to capture long-run, place-based environmental features that shape human settlement and economic activity. The index aggregates standardized indicators of climate and physical geography, including measures of temperature, humidity, sunshine, topographic variation, and the presence of surface water. Finally, we include in our model the average voting spread in the presidential elections that roughly accompany our data, from 2008 to 2024. Low values indicate a Republican-majority and high values a Democratic-majority voting population by county. Cases with missing data on these indicators were excluded via listwise deletion. All variables were standardized prior to analysis, and Euclidean distances were computed.

We then applied hierarchical agglomerative clustering using Ward’s minimum-variance method (Ward.D2), which groups counties so as to minimize within-cluster heterogeneity (Murtagh and Legendre 2014 ). The number of clusters was evaluated using dendrogram inspection and silhouette diagnostics. Although silhouette scores indicated a strong two-cluster separation (0.61), three-cluster (0.31) and four-cluster (0.30) k-solutions showed comparable cohesion and revealed substantively meaningful secondary differentiation (see the Supplemental Material). Given the analytic aim of foregrounding internal diversity among RoN counties, we adopt a four-cluster solution and treat the resulting clusters as heuristic, ideal-typical groupings rather than natural kinds. Cluster profiles are summarized using cluster means on the original variable scales, and county membership in each cluster is examined to support substantive interpretation.

Results

Temporal Patterns of RoN Adoption Demonstrate Clustering

We begin by describing the timing of RoN initiatives in the United States. Establishing the time scale at which initiatives occur and how they cluster across jurisdictions provides a necessary foundation for the analyses that follow. Figures 1 and 2 summarize key descriptive patterns in the temporal concentration and local intensity of RoN adoption.

Figure 1.

RoN initiatives per year in the United States (2002–2024).

Figure 2.

RoN counties with multiple initiatives, 2002 to 2024 (time between ordinances).

Figure 1 presents the annual number of unique RoN initiatives (n = 129) from the early 2000s through 2024, indicating that adoption unfolds unevenly over time rather than following a linear or exponential trajectory. After a small number of early initiatives in the late 2000s, RoN adoption increased substantially in the early and mid-2010s, followed by periods of fluctuation in the decade following. Rather than exhibiting steady momentum, the temporal distribution is characterized by distinct bursts of adoption and clustering across years.

Figure 2 further documents this clustering by focusing on counties that adopted multiple RoN initiatives between 2002 and 2024 (n = 21), typically in multiple cities or towns and within relatively short time frames. For example, in counties such as Grafton County, New Hampshire, and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, which passed more than five unique initiatives, the average interval between ordinances is less than two years. Similar patterns are observed across most other counties with multiple RoN initiatives. This concentration of adoption within short periods highlights the extent to which RoN initiatives are temporally compressed within specific jurisdictions.

RoN Geographies Demonstrate Diversity across Social, Political, and Ecological Boundaries

We find that RoN counties diverge most from typical U.S. counties in level of education (Figure 3). We also compare the distribution of partisan voting spreads of RoN counties against all other U.S. counties (Figure 4). We find that RoN counties are, in general, more centrist and slightly left leaning relative to the distribution of all other counties, which skews more conservative or right leaning. The RoN county density is shifted modestly to the left of zero, indicating a slight Democratic advantage relative to Republican vote share, whereas non-RoN counties exhibit a mean that lies further to the right.

Figure 3.

County-level density charts comparing RoN and non-RoN U.S. counties on key demographic markers.

Figure 4.

Political orientation of RoN counties against all U.S. counties.

RoN and Pollution Enforcement: Spatial and Distributional Patterns

Spatial patterns of pollution enforcement in RoN counties provide little evidence that RoN geographies are disproportionately exposed to severe instances of state measured pollution (Figure 5). At the national scale, RoN initiatives are distributed across counties with a wide range of pollution enforcement intensities rather than clustering in the most violating geographies. Although a small number of RoN counties appear in higher enforcement-per-capita bins, these cases are not dominant and do not drive the overall pattern. Notably, in regions such as the U.S. Northeast and upper Midwest, RoN initiatives are interspersed across counties characterized by low to moderate levels of enforcement activity. Figure 5 is also important to demonstrate geographic clustering of RoN initiatives, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. This clustering raises important questions about the spatial diffusion of the RoN movement, including the role of regional political cultures, legal advocacy networks, and institutional pathways that facilitate local legal experimentation. Most importantly, however, these clusters do not align with heightened pollution violations, suggesting that the spatial diffusion of RoN is not a single response to heightened pollution exposure.

Figure 5.

Geographic distributions of RoN initiatives (2002–2024) and pollution enforcement actions per 10,000 people (2000–2020).

We also examine the distributional relationship between enforcement actions per capita and county population, independent of geography (Figure 6). RoN counties largely overlap with the broader national distribution of pollution enforcement per capita rather than clustering at particularly high or low enforcement levels, relative to population size. Although a few RoN counties appear at the upper end of enforcement-per-capita values, these cases remain exceptional rather than systematic.

Figure 6.

Distribution of EPA enforcement actions per capita across U.S. counties.

Together, Figures 5 and 6 indicate that although RoN initiatives exhibit clear geographic clustering that warrants further investigation from a social movement and diffusion perspective, they do not appear to be strongly associated with elevated pollution exposure when assessed through federal enforcement actions.

Typology Findings

Hierarchical clustering of counties that have adopted RoN legislation reveals four distinct county types (k = 4), differentiated along dimensions of demographic scale, socioeconomic resources, racial composition, natural amenities, and ideological lean. The distribution of cases across clusters is uneven, with two large clusters and two smaller, more distinctive groupings, indicating both a dominant structural pattern among RoN counties and meaningful secondary variation.

Before examining cluster-level variation in detail, Figure 7 and Tables 1 and 2 provide an overview of the dominant structural pattern among RoN counties and the meaningful secondary variation that differentiates distinct county types. As shown in Figure 7, the hierarchical clustering analysis reveals four empirically distinct models of RoN adoption. Table 1 presents unstandardized average characteristics for each cluster, while Table 2 provides standardized z-scores that illustrate relative departures from the RoN-county mean across key socioeconomic, demographic, and environmental attributes.

Figure 7.

Hierarchical clustering of U.S. counties that have adopted RoN legislation.

Table 1.

Average County Characteristics by RoN Cluster.

Cluster	Population	Income ($)	% Non-Hispanic White	% College Educated	Natural Amenity Index	Political Margin^a
1	396,582	56,752	74.0	29.0	.94	−.05
2	537,420	61,456	78.5	32.5	.91	−.02
3	1,910,132	70,645	68.6	37.9	4.80	−.24
4	406,742	61,594	80.2	36.2	1.51	−.14

Note. Average county characteristics by rights of nature (RoN) cluster. This table reports raw (unstandardized) means for population, median household income, racial composition, educational attainment, natural amenity index values, and partisan voting margin across the four empirically identified RoN county clusters.

Negative values denote Democratic Party advantage.

Table 2.

Standardized (z Score) Profiles of RoN County Clusters.

Cluster	Population	Income	% Non-Hispanic White	% College Educated	Natural Amenity Index	Political Margin	n
1	−.22	−.50	.24	−.72	−.53	.74	53
2	−.11	.73	.24	.89	−.01	−.46	56
3	−.31	−1.17	−1.23	−.92	1.37	−.64	13
4	5.38	.26	−2.61	−.01	2.60	−1.39	4

Note. Standardized (z score) profiles of rights of nature (RoN) county clusters. Values reflect standardized deviations from the mean across population, income, racial composition, educational attainment, natural amenity index, and partisan voting margin, allowing comparison of relative differences across the four clusters.

Cluster 1 (n = 53) represents a baseline or low-capacity RoN county type. Counties in this cluster are modest in population size, have below-average median household income and educational attainment, and are somewhat whiter than the RoN-county average. They also score below average on both natural amenities and ideological polarization. Substantively, this cluster appears to capture RoN adoption in relatively ordinary governance contexts, where neither high institutional capacity nor acute environmental amenity value strongly structures local politics. The size of this cluster suggests that RoN legislation most commonly emerges in demographically unexceptional counties rather than in highly distinctive or elite settings. Cluster 1 includes counties such as Lorain County (Ohio), Grafton County (New Hampshire), and Saguache County (Colorado). These cases illustrate RoN adoption in relatively ordinary governance contexts: counties that are neither especially affluent nor highly institutionally resourced, moderately white, and only modestly polarized.

Cluster 2 (n = 56) is characterized by higher socioeconomic and institutional capacity. Compared with cluster 1, these counties exhibit substantially higher median household income and educational attainment, while remaining similar in population size and racial composition. Natural amenity values are near the RoN-county mean, but ideological polarization is notably higher. This cluster plausibly reflects professionalized or high-capacity counties in which RoN adoption is embedded in more developed legal, civic, or advocacy infrastructures. Importantly, although these counties are relatively affluent and educated, they are not extreme in racial composition, complicating interpretations that frame RoN adoption primarily as a function of racial homogeneity. Counties such as Washington County (Oregon), Hamilton County (Ohio), and Lucas County (Ohio) exemplify cluster 2. These jurisdictions combine higher than average income and educational attainment with moderate natural amenities and elevated political polarization.

Cluster 3 (n = 13) represents a marginalized, high-amenity subtype. These counties have lower income and educational attainment than the RoN-county average and substantially lower proportions of non-Hispanic white residents. At the same time, they score well above average on natural amenities and exhibit elevated ideological polarization. This configuration aligns most closely with accounts that emphasize historically devalued or environmentally vulnerable communities, suggesting a local RoN profile rooted in environmental conflict, exposure, or collective resistance rather than institutional capacity. The relatively small size of this cluster indicates that while such cases are important, they do not exhaust the social bases of RoN politics. Cluster 3 includes cases such as Merrimack County (New Hampshire), Los Angeles County (California), and Buncombe County (North Carolina). These counties are marked by lower racial homogeneity and, on average, lower socioeconomic resources, alongside high natural amenity values and heightened ideological polarization.

Cluster 4 (n = 4) consists of a small set of structurally exceptional and politically salient cases. These counties are extreme outliers on ideological polarization and natural amenities and include at least one very large metropolitan jurisdiction, resulting in an exceptionally high standardized population score despite a moderate raw mean population. Racial composition in this cluster is markedly less white than in other RoN counties, while income and education levels are above average. The internal heterogeneity of this cluster, combined with its extremity relative to the RoN-county mean, suggests that it captures cases where RoN adoption functions as a highly visible, contested, and symbolically charged political intervention rather than a routine governance instrument. Given its small size, this cluster is best treated as an ideal-typical category highlighting exceptional modes of RoN enactment rather than a generalizable county type. Counties such as Grafton County (New Hampshire), Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), and Rockingham County (New Hampshire) illustrate cluster 4. Despite differences in scale and local context, these cases share exceptionally high levels of political polarization and symbolic intensity around environmental governance.

Comparing these findings in contrast to the existing literature, we find that RoN counties are not demographically uniform and cannot be adequately characterized by “overwhelming Whiteness” alone. Instead, RoN legislation appears across multiple county types, including low-capacity mainstream counties, high-capacity professionalized jurisdictions, marginalized high-amenity communities, and a small number of structurally exceptional cases. This typology underscores the heterogeneous social and political contexts in which RoN politics emerge and suggests that race operates as one dimension among several, rather than as the primary organizing feature of RoN adoption.

Discussion and Conclusion

At the highest level, our results suggest that the RoN movement in the United States is significantly more diverse and widespread than has previously been suggested by the literature. This finding opens the door to a variety of future sociological research, especially as RoN picks up steam as a legal and social movement. Before turning to the substantive implications of these results, several limitations warrant emphasis.

First, RoN remains a rare phenomenon in the United States. Our dataset comprises 129 initiatives across roughly 80 unique counties, a small fraction of the more than 3,100 U.S. counties, and an even smaller fraction of the approximately 56,000 county-years in our study window. Moreover, a subset of counties account for multiple initiatives, meaning that the effective number of independent adopting jurisdictions is smaller still. This sample size constrains the inferential reach of our analysis in important ways. Our descriptive comparisons can characterize the counties where RoN has emerged but cannot establish with confidence that these patterns would hold as the movement expands.

Second, our clustering analysis identifies patterned variation among current adopters but should be understood as generating heuristic groupings rather than definitive adoption pathways. We treat these clusters as ideal-typical descriptions of where RoN has taken root to date, not as predictive models of where it will emerge next. With these two interpretive caveats in mind, our contribution is precisely the “table-setting” we claim: an empirical baseline that we hope future research can build upon.

Our results first show that RoN adoption is not demographically narrow. RoN counties vary substantially in racial composition, income, and educational attainment, and cannot be characterized as uniformly white, affluent, or elite. To be sure, RoN counties in the two largest clusters do skew somewhat whiter than the national average, and we do not claim that race is irrelevant to RoN adoption. Rather, our findings suggest, that against previous characterization of “overwhelming whiteness” (Kohl and Walenta 2023), whiteness operates as one important dimension among several rather than as the singular or defining feature of RoN communities, and that meaningful variation in racial composition exists across adopting counties, particularly in clusters 3 and 4.

This finding is significant in the context of environmental justice scholarship, which has consistently documented the overwhelming whiteness of mainstream U.S. environmental and conservation movements (Pellow 2018; Taylor 2016). As such literature has demonstrated, the whiteness of U.S. environmental movements reflects the structural patterns in who has historically had access to environmental amenities, organizational resources, and the political standing to make legal claims on behalf of nature. But against this backdrop, the demographic heterogeneity we observe across RoN counties is a substantively notable departure from the norm rather than simply a null result. Such a finding suggests that RoN may be assembling a somewhat different constituency than the one that has historically anchored U.S. environmentalism, though the mechanisms behind this divergence remain an important open question for future research. In other words, we find that, despite its superficial radicality, appears to be a remarkably portable legal object among U.S. counties.

Second, contrary to expectations from the literature on “special” versus “ordinary” nature, RoN adoption is not concentrated in particularly scenic or high-amenity landscapes (Farrell 2020; Rea and Frickel 2023). One may assume that U.S. RoN may follow in the footsteps of several other problematic Western environmentalist strategies that aim to set aside only the most “pristine” instances of nature as sacred, using tactics such as fortress conservation, land easements, national parks, or land-trust land for the wealthy to recreate (Cronon 1996; Farrell 2020). However, using a standardized natural amenity index, we find that RoN efforts span a wide range of environmental contexts, including many geographies with only average or below-average amenity values. Such landscapes are those that are not often seen as nature to be “protected” and “conserved” under Western land sensibilities modeled after the colonial environmental visions of American environmentalists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold (Cronon 1996; Spence 1999). This suggests that RoN frequently emerges in relation to what the literature would classify as “ordinary” nature, rather than being driven by symbolic attachment to “exceptional” landscapes.

Third, RoN does not appear to be a direct response to extreme pollution exposure or heightened regulatory conflict. One may expect that counties with disproportionately high violations and ongoing struggles against some of America’s largest polluters would explore a wider range of possible environmental legal experiments such as RoN as means to push back against issues. However, counties with RoN initiatives largely mirror the national distribution of pollution enforcement actions, rather than clustering in the most heavily regulated or environmentally burdened jurisdictions. This distinguishes RoN from more reactive forms of environmental governance and suggests that its adoption is not primarily driven by acute environmental harm, but by other underlying motives that the literature has yet to explore.

Finally, RoN counties tend to occupy relatively moderate political terrain. Although they are, on average, slightly left leaning, they cluster closer to partisan parity and exhibit less ideological extremity than the national distribution of counties. RoN adoption thus appears less rooted in polarized or fringe political contexts than in settings where cross-cutting political coalitions and pragmatic legal experimentation are more plausible. This, again, complicates scholarly accounts that point toward the “small, rural, predominantly conservative” nature of RoN communities (Kohl and Walenta 2023).

These findings carry important implications for the study of environmental law and politics, suggesting that environmental actors may find broader political resonance by framing ecological problems in terms of threats to immanent, place-based entities (such as rivers or ecosystems) rather than technoscientific processes (such as climate change), thereby expanding the potential for cross-cutting policy coalitions. Extending this slightly, these patterns suggest that, for many Americans, abandoning the moral logic of liberalism (i.e., a moral framework in which the individual constitutes the primary unit of justice) may be perceived as far more radical than extending that logic beyond the human, indicating that liberalism functions as a more durable and widely shared moral grammar than human exceptionalism itself (Bryant and Farrell 2023).

At the same time, this durability carries a critical ambivalence: by bending rights discourse toward rivers, forests, or ecosystems, RoN ordinances may retool liberal legal frameworks to stabilize and preserve them rather than to overturn them, reinforcing foundational logics of liberalism even as they gesture toward ontological transformation (Sindoni 2025). In this sense, RoN reminds us that rights, even in their most radical-seeming forms, can operate as instruments of accommodation as readily as of resistance.

We also believe that to draw attention to emerging phenomena such as the RoN movement and away from highly contested spaces such as climate change is an example of what Latour (2018) called bringing our politics “down to earth,” reorienting our political and scholarly attention away from abstract, universalist horizons and toward the material, ecological, and territorial conditions that make collective life possible. Our findings reinforce existing research showing that when highly abstract and polarized environmental issues are rendered proximate and place-based, environmental care is more readily articulated as a shared common good rather than a partisan position, underscoring the historically chameleonic character of environmental politics (Bryant and Farrell 2024).

Unlike ANT and other versions of “bringing the nonhuman in” (Bargheer 2018; Jerolmack and Tavory 2014; Scoville 2019, 2022), theoretically speaking, RoN is remarkably simple: the extension OF legal-rational authority to a new subset of entities, as has happened at numerous moments throughout history (Weber et al. 1922). Other forms of authority are of course readily conferred upon nonhumans. We might think of the literature on the disproportionate attention and protection afforded to charismatic megafauna such as grizzly bears and whales over less visible but ecologically consequential creatures such as fungi and soil bacteria (Prokop et al. 2022; Tsing 2015); or the traditional authority granted to animals such as cows in India, whose protected status derives from long-standing religious and cultural practices rather than from legal-rational frameworks (Natrajan 2024). The central theoretical question raised by RoN, then, is not whether it represents a radical conceptual departure, but what kinds of authority it actually produces in practice: how, and to what extent, these claims shape case law, regulatory enforcement, and material protections for communities on the ground. Future research should therefore move beyond symbolic recognition to examine the concrete legal and ecological effects of RoN, attending closely to when such claims meaningfully reconfigure institutional power and when they remain largely aspirational.

The findings presented here provide critical table-setting for future empirical research on RoN in the United States and other settler colonial contexts. First, they point to the need for richer mixed-methods work examining how local actors, coalitions, and framing strategies shape RoN adoption at county and municipal levels. Such qualitative work may include how and why grassroots groups pursue RoN over alternative legal tools and how its promises and constraints are interpreted in practice. These qualitative inquiries could be further sharpened by deeper analysis of the geographic clustering presented in this study, particularly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest – such trends point toward the need for formal spatial diffusion modeling, an approach that has been productively applied to the study of other rights-based legislative movements but has yet to be systematically applied to RoN either in the United States or internationally (i.e., Kalenkoski and Lacombe 2006). Second, future research should assess the judicial durability and sociological effects of RoN, attending to how even legally invalidated ordinances may reshape public discourse, moral claims about nature, political mobilization, and regulatory practice. Third, deeper engagement with the environmental justice dimensions of RoN is essential, particularly in examining how marginalized and Tribal communities mobilize RoN within distinct jurisdictional and governance contexts, and whether such efforts generate more durable or transformative outcomes. Finally, comparative sociological research remains crucial for situating U.S. RoN initiatives within broader international patterns, clarifying how RoN’s legal meanings, political functions, and institutional forms vary across national contexts and whether it constitutes a coalescing global movement or a set of context-specific legal experiments.

Ultimately, what the rapidly growing RoN movement reveals is that the boundary between human and nonhuman, the very divide that sociology has spent more than a century policing, theorizing, and occasionally dismantling, is being materially reconfigured today in the halls of courtrooms, city councils, and county chambers across the U.S. Where Latour, Haraway, and other scholars of STS studies and nonhuman sociology have argued for the nonhuman’s theoretical inclusion in social life, ordinary communities are enacting it into practice through the eye of the law. The theoretical foundations laid by Latour, Haraway, and their successors were essential. Without them, environmental sociologists would lack the conceptual vocabulary to make sense of what communities enacting RoN may be striving toward. Today, the task before sociology is to advance that theory by following these material movements empirically, attending carefully to where, how, and with what consequences rivers, forests, and ecosystems are becoming entangled with the grammar of rights.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231261446748 – Supplemental material for Rights of Nature in the United States: An Empirical Analysis of Local Legal Adoption

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231261446748 for Rights of Nature in the United States: An Empirical Analysis of Local Legal Adoption by Raffaele Sindoni and Jesse Callahan Bryant in Socius

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Raffaele Sindoni

Jesse Callahan Bryant

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

Author Biographies

Raffaele Sindoni is a PhD candidate at Yale University in political ecology and human geography. Raffaele’s current research focuses on the sociopolitical aspects of RoN and environmental personhood, paying special attention to the means by which RoN interacts with Western law, private property regimes, and Indigenous sovereignty. Raffaele’s other work includes critical research on green capitalism (i.e., carbon offsets, biodiversity credits), community resilience, and the relationships between sovereign Indigenous nations and the American state.

Jesse Callahan Bryant is a PhD candidate at the Yale School of the Environment. His research is focused on using emerging computational methods to address theoretical questions in environmental sociology, right-wing studies, and at the intersection of the two.

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