The nature rights movement keeps making inroads into establishment thinking — and people keep ignoring the threat.

The concept has now been advocated in a major opinion piece in the New York Times. Utah’s Great Salt Lake is shrinking — a legitimate problem worthy of focused concern and remediation. Utah native and Harvard Divinity School’s writer-in-residence Terry Tempest Williams — who focuses on “the spiritual implications of climate change” — makes a strong case that the Lake is in trouble.

Her proposed remedies reflect a proper conservationist approach worthy of being debated:

Scientists tell us the lake needs an additional one million acre-feet per year to reverse its decline, increasing average stream flow to about 2.5 million acre-feet per year. A gradual refilling would begin. Two-thirds of the natural flow going into the lake is currently being diverted: 80 percent of that diversion by agriculture, 10 percent by industries and 10 percent by municipalities. Water conservation provides a map for how to live within our means. We can create water banks and budgets where we know how much water we have and how much water we spend. Public and private green turf can be retired.

If only Williams had stopped there. Alas, she plunges into environmental radicalism, urging that the Great Salt Lake be declared a person and granted rights. She quotes ecologist Ben Abbott to the effect that the lake owns its water:

“If we believe in the Western water doctrine of ‘first in time, first in rights,’ then the water law of prior appropriation says these water rights originally belonged to her as a sovereign body,” said Mr. Abbott.

Please. This is nature-worship mysticism. The Great Salt Lake is a geological feature. It is not a living being. It is not sentient. It cannot own anything.

Nor should it be granted human-style rights. But don’t tell that to Williams:

The Rights of Nature is now a global movement granting personhood to rivers, mountains and forests. In Ecuador, they have granted constitutional rights to Pachamama, Earth Mother.

In the United States, Lake Erie was granted personhood in 2019, allowing citizens to sue on behalf of the lake. Although this right was invalidated by a federal judge, this is the new frontier of granting legal status to a living world. Why not grant personhood rights to Great Salt Lake, which in 2021 was voted “Utahn of the Year” in The Salt Lake Tribune? This is not a radical but a rational response to an increasingly wounded Earth.

Wrong. It is radical. And it is profoundly subversive of Western Civilizational values:

When we dig to the intellectual core of the movement, we find that the controversy isn’t about “rights” at all. Rather, we are having an epochal debate about the scope, nature, and extent of our responsibilities toward the natural world. The rights approach would impose such extreme duties on us we would hurt ourselves.

So, by all means, act to protect the Great Salt Lake. But turn it into a “person” with enforceable rights? Absolutely not!