North Dakota State House Declares People Superior to Animals and Inanimate Objects

Bill aims to block 'rights of nature' movement in the state

Badlands from the Painted Canyon Overlook in Theodore Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota. Nagel Photography/Shutterstock

The North Dakota House of Representatives passed a personhood bill on Feb. 2, declaring humans superior to animals, environmental elements, artificial intelligence, inanimate objects, corporations, and governmental entities.

The measure, House Bill 1361 (pdf), passed by a vote of 87–7. The bill was sponsored by Republican state Rep. Cole Christensen.

“The people on the committee were like, ‘Is this really necessary?’ And I said, ‘Unfortunately, it is,’” Christensen told The Epoch Times. He cited news from the World Economic Forum and elsewhere indicating that granting nonhumans the status of persons is increasingly being promoted or implemented.

Nature as a Rights-Bearing Entity

For example, in 2021, the Magpie River in Québec—known by the indigenous Innu nation as Muteshekau-shipu—became the first river in Canada to be granted personhood rights.

The Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie Regional County Municipality declared the river a legal person. The move assigned the river nine rights, including the right to flow and to maintain its biodiversity. It also allows for the appointment of legal guardians to ensure these rights are respected, a 2021 joint press release (pdf) from the Muteshekau-shipu Alliance and the International Observatory on the Rights of Nature said.

The rights that come with personhood can be protected in court or government policy.

The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature promotes a “rights of nature” ideology, which holds that nature should no longer be treated as property under the law and that ecosystems should have rights, according to its website, where it keeps a timeline of “movement milestones.”

An essential step in achieving this is to create a system of jurisprudence that treats nature as a rights-bearing entity and not as property to be exploited at will, the website says.

The Great Lakes region is home to over 30 million people and holds one-fifth of the world's freshwater resources. Courtesy of SeaWiFS Project NASA/GSFC and Geoeye

‘Rights of Nature’

In 2018, Crestone, Colorado, became one of the first cities in the United States to legally acknowledge the “rights of nature,” with the adoption of its Rights of Nature Resolution, which stated that “nature, natural ecosystems, communities and all species possess intrinsic and inalienable rights which must be effectuated to protect life on Earth.”

In 2021, the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe sued the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources in tribal court on behalf of wild rice after an oil pipeline company was allowed to pump massive amounts of ground water, risking the wild rice in lakes. In 2018, White Earth leaders had adopted a tribal law recognizing the rights of wild rice—known as manoomin in Ojibwa—to exist and flourish (pdf).

In 2022, the New York Legislature introduced a bill giving rights to the Great Lakes ecosystem. The bill, which aimed to create a “Great Lakes bill of rights” covering an area containing one-fifth of the world’s freshwater, did not move out of committee.

“The Great Lakes ecosystem, the Great Lakes, and the watersheds that drain into the Great Lakes and their connecting channels, shall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist, persist, flourish, naturally evolve, regenerate and be restored by culpable parties, free from human violations of these rights and unencumbered by legal privileges vested in property, including corporate property,” reads the proposed legislation from New York state Assemblyman Patrick Burke, a Democrat.

The North Dakota bill, which has now moved to the state Senate, affirms that “an individual’s rights are superior and not equal to environmental elements, artificial intelligence, animals, inanimate objects, corporations, or governmental entities” and that “environmental elements, artificial intelligence, animals, inanimate objects, corporations, or governmental entities may not be granted personhood in the state or any right personhood entails.”

It is easy to find examples of human rights being assigned to nonhumans in the United States and around the world. However, if HB 1361 passes the state Senate, there will be no such examples in North Dakota.