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L.A.Times:

No other country has gone as far as Ecuador in proposing to give trees their day in court, but it certainly is not alone in its recalibration of natural rights. Religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Dalai Lama and the Archbishop of Constantinople, have declared that caring for the environment is a spiritual duty. And earlier this year, the Catholic Church updated its list of deadly sins to include polluting the environment.

Ecuador is codifying this shift in sensibility. In some ways, this makes sense for a country whose cultural identity is almost indistinguishable from its regional geography - the Galapagos, the Amazon, the Sierra. How this new area of constitutional law will work, however, is another question. We aren't ready to endorse such a step at home, or even abroad. But it's intriguing. We'll be watching Ecuador's example.

Eoin O'Carroll:

Ecuador's proposed constitution includes an article that grants nature the right to "exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution" and will grant legal standing to any person to defend those rights in court.

Voters will get to decide on Sept. 28 whether to adopt the new constitution, which would allow the president to run for reelection, to dissolve Congress, and to exert great control over the country's central bank. According to Reuters, 56 percent of Ecuadorans approve of the proposed document.

Archy:

In a choice of phrase that would be almost unthinkable in the Untied States, the first article states that nature has the right to maintain "its processes in evolution." While it's possible to read that use of the word "evolution" to mean simply "change" and not to refer to the transformation of species through Darwinian processes, the very presence of the word would be too controversial to survive in this country. But in Catholic Ecuador, things are different.

This is one of the most unambiguous extensions of rights to a nonhuman entity that any country has attempted in modern times. In the United States, corporations acquired individual rights over a century ago almost by accident. Laws in Western countries against cruelty to animals regularly dance around the issue of whether this constitutes rights. Indigenous populations often exercise rights as groups that are separate from their rights as individuals. And Fascist countries tried to reverse the whole Western trend of individual rights by reasserting the superiority of the rights of the nation and state over the individual. But this is something new. The Ecuadoran move to encode the rights of nature in the constitution goes beyond anything yet attempted. It might prove to be a dead letter in practice, but it is definitely a precedent to watch.

Galapagos?