Environmental Rights or Rights of the Environment?

An entry on my Facebook "Top News" today linked to the "news" that Ecuador had recently granted "the environment" legal rights. I wasn't able to track down the link but a brief search on the web revealed that the citizens of Ecuador amended their constitution in 2008 to provide that:

Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments, communities, and individuals to enforce those rights

One's suspicion that the amendment might have been a political stunt is reinforced when one reads that less than a year later the government of Ecuador's recently elected president, Rafael Correa, who had been instrumental in drafting the amendment, withdrew the legal status of Acción Ecológica, Ecuador's leading environmental group.

In any event, even putting aside the question of what it means for the rights of an ecosystem to be "self-executing," there is a fundamental question of whether such entities can have rights. In my lengthy series of blog entries on Nicholas Wolterstorff's book "Justice," I skipped this question. My bad.

My soon-to-be-published article on a distinctively Christian foundation for human rights (in short, the image of God thing) might lead some to conclude that "nature" cannot have rights. Not so fast, my friend. I suspect my answer will be no, at least not directly, but I'm not sure yet. For those whose visceral reaction might be "hell no," I have a question: If nature cannot have rights, how can a corporation?