Wisconsin Wolf Awareness Week: Rights of Nature for wolves.

Granting nature rights way of thinking is becoming more common now due to the devastation to the Earth caused by climate change. We need large carnavores like wolves now more than ever, and they need us as well. They need us to change from justifying their fate by fighting over whose science is right or wrong to enacting laws that give them rights. It is necessary for the health of us all here on Earth. There is a growing movement to grant wild beings rights. It is taking hold in Wisconsin.

Milwaukee County, in 2023, adopted a rights of nature resolution.

The resolution states, “Supporting the ‘rights of Nature” across waterways and bodies of water in Milwaukee County for protection and ensuring human activities do not interfere with nature and its ability to be healthy, robust, and resilient.”

We can now add more good news about the movement to grant rights of nature in Wisconsin. According to Wisconsin Public Radio, some Democratic state lawmakers said natural features like lakes and forests should be given their own legal standing and unveiled what’s known as “rights to nature” legislation during a news conference scheduled to coincide with Indigenous People’s Day.

It is becoming a fight to keep local control against the state.

The Republican bill preempting local rights of nature efforts is “anti-free speech, it’s anti-democratic,” Rep. Vincent Miresse (D-Stevens Point), one of the bills’ co-authors, told the Wisconsin Examiner. “Whereas our bill is, ‘Hey, let’s get this on the docket and actually have a productive conversation, actually bring in stakeholders about what it means to look at nature actually having rights.”

Even more news as the Ho-Chunk Nation included a right-of-nature provision in its tribal constitution and the Menominee Nation has also adopted legislation recognizing the rights of the Menominee River.

Wanting to protect a lake.

One proposals seeks to protect Devil’s Lake State Park, specifically. At the same time, the other is a more general resolution encouraging the state to affirm the rights of all natural resources in the state.

Also in that resolution it calls on local governments to adopt their own rights of nature principle. It sits in cantrast to the rupublican backed bill that wants to stop local governments from introducing such ordinances. The bill’s sponsors say those local laws could undermine the country’s founding legal principles, which recognize the rights of people.

Can the rights of people and rights of nature work together? As we move further into the debate it is certainly about economics and ecology.

It is a matter of quanity over quality.

Ecological economics starts with the observation that the human economy is a subsystem of the larger ecological life support system. It recognizes that humans are a part of this larger ecological system and not apart from it. Our current state of the economic system allows for growth at the expense of the environment. The environment is at risk in simple terms of overuse. To quote our current administration, “Drill baby Drill”, attitude only serves the industrial corporations, leading to higher greenhouse gas emissions. We keep growing our economy, and that growth implies an increase in quantity or size. Can our environment, our Mother Earth, sustain that growth? Should it be quality over quantity? In my research for this article, I found the solution must be quality, not quantity. A sustainable future involves all inhabitants moving away from the consumer being the main driver to an ecological sustainability main driver.

First off, let me admit I’m not an economist. However, I am a consumer. I buy products, and that fuels the economy. The United States produces a total market value of all final goods and services produced is estimated at 27.721 trillion in GDP, the largest in the world. Being the largest Gross Domestic Product leader in the world but at what expence.

Extinction of Fauna and Flora

How many animals are extinct? The baseline extinction rate is about one species per every one million species per year. It’s hard to quantify, but the numbers are estimated to be in the billions. Scientists agree that today’s extinction rate is hundreds, or even thousands, of times higher than the natural baseline rate. Take the case of the Passenger pigeon. Their numbers were wiped out after Europeans arrived and hunted them for cheap meat. In 1914, the last known surviving member of the species, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo.

With all of this rights of nature taking place here in Wisconsin how do wolves fit into that? Large carnavires like wolves keep our ecosystems healthy.

My message for Wolf Awareness Week 2025.

We must work to create laws that give them rights. We must have justice for sentient beings. We are more similar than different from wild wolves. We cannot continue to justify all the harm we do to them because we say we are different from them, and so we must protect them from us (hunters). The science keeps justifying the hunting of them because it says they will rebound. Killing them will not hurt them, so they think. Killing is not conservation.

But it does hurt them, they feel pain, they feel loss of family members, as we do. Just look at your family dog and try to explain away that they do not feel the same as we do.
This way of thinking is becoming more common now due to the devastation to the Earth caused by climate change. We need them now more than ever, and they need us as well. They need us to change from justifying their fate by fighting over whose science is right or wrong to enacting laws that give them rights. It is necessary for the health of us all. There is a growing movement to grant wild beings rights.

The Rights of Nature, Rights of nature, or Earth rights, is a legal and jurisprudential theory that describes inherent rights as associated with ecosystems and species, similar to the concept of fundamental human rights.

Happy Wolf Awareness Week!