Constitutionalizing the Rights of Nature: The Case of Canada's Old-Growth Forests in Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores what the inclusion of constitutional environmental rights (CERs), specifically the rights of nature (RoN), could look like in Canada and their potential impact on the protection of endangered old-growth forests in British Columbia (BC). BC is home to some of the last remaining old-growth forests in Canada. While deemed essential by the province to the forestry industry, intact higher productivity old-growth forests hold significant cultural, social, and economic values, and play critical ecological functions on which BC’s biodiversity depends. Despite this, old-growth logging persists in the province, culminating in Canada’s largest act of civil disobedience: the Fairy Creek Blockades. Reflective of recurrent trends in BC’s forestry practices from Clayoquot Sound’s “War in the Woods,” this mobilization demands the need for stronger environmental regulations and oversight in Canada. Though CER provisions positively correlate with environmental outcomes, these rights hierarchize human property over nature’s right to exist, flourish, or be restored. I explore a potential avenue for protecting the rights of old-growth forests in BC: the stand-alone rights of nature in the Canadian Constitution. By examining rights of nature laws in Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand, I will investigate what the constitutional RoN could look like in Canada. These rights might not only ensure the sustained protection of old-growth ecosystems in BC but incorporate Indigenous worldviews and legal orders into Canada’s dominant legal system. Keywords: Rights of nature, constitutional environmental rights, old-growth forests, Indigenous legal orders, British Columbia
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".