Earth Law Center educates and advocates for laws and policies that recognize and promote the inherent rights of nature to exist, thrive and evolve. We envision a future where the inherent rights of nature are respected and implemented globally. Earth Law Center takes action at the local, regional and international levels to advance new laws and policies that reflect the inherent rights of the natural world, as reflected in Paragraph 39 of the 2012 Rio +20 Outcome Document, The Future We Want. Please see ELC's website at www.earthlaw.org for information on all of our programs. With regard to the Summit, we work at the international level to advance new laws and policies that reflect the inherent rights of nature. We specifically have worked on programs to advance such laws in countries including Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, Australia, USA, China, Spain, India, Canada, the UK, and others. These efforts include legal documents (amicus curiae), expert testimony to UN and other international officials, projects with colleagues on the ground to advance nature's rights, educational initiatives (including legal instruction), specific line edits to UN sustainable development documents to reflect nature's rights and ecological economics, and many other projects.

ELC is most interested in the current Summit due to what ELC considers a relatively anthropocentric focus on human needs, rather than a corresponding focus on nature's needs in the final post-2015 document. It is only by ensuring that we protect the inherent rights of nature to exist, thrive and evolve (as described in Ecuador's Constitution, for example) that we can ensure our own well-being into the future. Earth Law Center's Executive Director Linda Sheehan and staff have been active for the last four years in United Nations processes advancing a healthy environment. Ms. Sheehan served as an invited Expert at the 2013 Interactive Dialogue of the General Assembly on Harmony with Nature, and in 2014 Ms. Sheehan moderated this expert panel before the General Assembly. See http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/dialogues.html. Ms. Sheehan has provided comments and other interventions to the United Nations on the post-2015 MDGs as well as the SDGs and the Outcome Document of Rio +20. Copies of the majority of these can be found at www.earthlaw.org.

Earth Law Center also was the first NGO to map violations of human rights and nature's rights, at: The UN itself tweeted to followers about the release of this map for their use. ELC worked over the past year with Yale Law School to add information to this map and use the data to develop a report on the rising number of such "co-violations" of nature's rights and human rights. ELC will release this report at COP21 in Paris, along with colleagues working around the world (particularly in Latin America) to stem such rights violations. Also at COP21, ELC will work with European, Latin American, African and Asian colleagues to present this information to the public in the context of a few, select cases, and will provide specific recommendations for action to address the violations in these particular cases. This work in general is intended to raise awareness about the connectedness of our economic system and environmental health, and to offer new, sustainable paths forward that recognize our integration with the natural world. No but we do have audited financials - 2014EarthLawCenterFinancialStatements.pdf Diana Weynand, President, USA
Liz Musch, Member, France
Patricia Siemen, Secretary, USA
Leslie Tamminen, Treasurer, USA Bylaws9-10-08.pdf