José DeCoux moved to the Los Cedros reserve in northern Ecuador from the US in the 1980s. He was "sort of heeding the call to save the rainforest, or something", he told BBC Future Planet.
In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to change its constitution to state that nature has the same rights as people. The change was led by Ecuador's Indigenous movement, and marked one of the first major steps in what has become known as the 'rights of nature' movement – a movement centred on a legal framework that recognises the inherent rights of the natural world to the same protections as people and corporations.
With the help of friends and non-profits including Friends of the Earth Sweden and the Rainforest Information Center of Australia, DeCoux bought land in Los Cedros forest, and a conservation and eco-tourism project was born. DeCoux managed the reserve until his death in May, four years after being diagnosed with cancer.
The rights of nature movement "is a move to transform natural entities from objects to subjects, in courts and in front of the law", says Jacqueline Gallant from New York University's School of Law's Earth Rights Advocacy Clinic. "But in a much broader sense, it's been a movement to reanimate and recentre nature as a subject of intrinsic worth," Gallant explains. This is in contrast, she says, to the Western view of nature as "an inanimate backdrop against which the drama of human activity unfolds".
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