The Green Bay, Wisconsin, City Council has voted to require the city’s Sustainability Commission to draft a nonbinding “Rights of Nature” resolution, which would assert that nature has legal rights equivalent to those of human beings.

According to the city’s July 15 report on this matter:

The “Rights of Nature” movement frames natural ecosystems and features such as rivers, wetlands, forests, and other living communities as legal persons that hold the right to exist, flourish, and be defended in a court of law. While most environmental regulations treat nature as property to be managed for human benefit, this movement asks governments to shift the paradigm and recognize nature itself as a legal entity with inherent rights.

According to Fox 11 News, the Sustainability Commission is “expected to take a few months” to draft a resolution, which will then require another vote by the city council. Although the pending resolution is nonbinding, it demonstrates the increasing attacks against America’s natural-law foundation — namely that rights come from God, not government. As the Declaration of Independence famously asserts, “All men are created equal, [and] they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

These rights include private property, as well as human use of natural resources. Genesis 1:28 records God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Of course, the unaddressed issue here is who will speak for the “rights” of the river, the wetland, the forest, the “endangered” salamander, etc. Why, the myriad radical attorneys for Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club, the ACLU, and the hundreds of other enviro-Leninist organizations funded by the Rockefeller-Ford-Soros foundations and U.S. government agencies, that’s who. Naturally. 

Rather than promoting a warped view of rights and schemes related to the UN’s Agenda 2030, Green Bay’s City Council and other governing bodies should recognize and reassert God-given rights as promoted by the Founding Fathers.