High in the Ecuadorean Andes is a cloud forest that is home to hundreds of endangered, extraordinary creatures, many of which seem to have wandered straight out of the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch — among them the spiny pocket mouse, the Dracula orchid, the glass frog and the tourmaline sunangel hummingbird. Numerous clear-running rivers rise in this mist-wreathed region, their flows nourished by the process of condensation and runoff called continuous fog drop. Walking through the humid, glowing greens of this cloud forest — known as Los Cedros — is what walking through damp moss might feel like if you had been miniaturized.
Four years ago, Los Cedros was nearly destroyed by gold and copper mining projects. But in November 2021, something remarkable happened to avert this catastrophe — something that could, in fact, only have occurred in Ecuador.
The country’s Constitutional Court issued a landmark judgment that recognized Los Cedros as both a legal person and a rights-bearing entity — and ruled that the proposed mining projects would violate those rights. The court’s judgment was both philosophically radical and legally powerful. The mining companies were required to remedy the damage they had caused and then quit the area. They were gone within 10 days.
That groundbreaking decision is just one of the ways in which Ecuador has played an outsize role in the global politics of nature. For almost two decades this small country has pioneered new ways of imagining and legislating the human relationship with other life on Earth — and inspired similar innovations around the world.
Now, however, that ecological progress is under severe threat from a series of reforms steamrolled by Ecuador’s young populist president, Daniel Noboa. Mr. Noboa is the heir to an agribusiness empire, and came to power with the promise of combating organized crime. His reforms will throw Ecuador’s stunning landscapes open to mining and drilling, dismantle government agencies in the name of “efficiency,” target public officials and civic organizations that he claims obstruct his agenda and concentrate broad emergency powers in his own hands.
Together these measures amount to the most serious assault on environmental protection and constitutional integrity in Ecuador’s recent history. They also come at a perilous moment for a country where murder rates increased sixfold between 2020 and 2023, and where violence toward environmental activists is now also rising.
Mr. Noboa’s first and boldest step was to dissolve the Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition on July 24 and hand its powers to the Ministry of Energy and Mines. This is a clear case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, and leaves Ecuador without an independent institution to protect its extraordinary ecosystems.
Five days later, his government introduced the so-called foundations law — an emergency bill that would allow the government to monitor and even shut down civil society organizations for “any activity that violates the fundamental rights of individuals, public order or state security.” Such broad powers echo now-defunct regulations that former president Rafael Correa used to persecute and dissolve environmental organizations a decade ago. While the government claims that the law is aimed at combating money laundering and criminal activity, it has not hidden the fact that it also targets environmental organizations that criticize its economic policies.
Mr. Noboa’s third step took the form of a law concerning protected ecological areas, which opens the door to the privatization of national parks and forest reserves and strips local communities of powers to manage them.
Because many of these measures are clearly unconstitutional, they have already been challenged before the Constitutional Court, which may strike down or force changes to parts of this disastrous legal package. But Mr. Noboa’s administration has already attacked the court in public and proposed a referendum to change the Constitution and make dissenting judges more susceptible to impeachment. On Aug. 12, after the court suspended some of his emergency powers, Mr. Noboa escalated the intimidation by leading a march against the court. The president’s supporters slung huge banners across the streets of the capital, Quito, bearing the names and photographs of court judges under the headline “These are the judges who are stealing our peace.”
It’s vital that the international community help Ecuadoreans resist this drastic rollback of environmental protections and assault on constitutional integrity. The world has benefited hugely from Ecuador’s moral imagination when it comes to nature. The country’s recognition of nature’s rights in 2008 catalyzed the global rights of nature movement, which has since seen New Zealand pass a parliamentary act declaring the legal personhood of the Whanganui River and the Spanish Senate recognize the rights of the vast Mar Menor lagoon.
Ecuador’s Galápagos archipelago was also the first bioregion to be recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site and recently became the site of the largest debt-for nature swap in history, setting a global precedent for freeing up millions of dollars to fund biodiversity conservation in highly indebted countries. Indigenous communities such as the Sarayaku have won major legal battles to defend the Amazon, and their young activists have become figureheads in the international climate struggle. (We have both been closely involved over the past three years with protecting Los Cedros and pursuing legal recognition of the cloud forest’s coauthorship of a song.)
The time has now come for the world to reciprocate Ecuador’s visionary environmental leadership. Activists, legal experts and Indigenous nations who continue to defend land, water and life there are working under rapidly deteriorating conditions. If support is not offered to them to resist the worst excesses of Mr. Noboa’s proposed reforms, the costs for life on Earth — from hummingbirds to humans — will be vast.
César Rodríguez-Garavito is a professor and the chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the N.Y.U. School of Law. Robert Macfarlane is a poet, a professor of English at Cambridge University and the author, most recently, of “Is a River Alive?”
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