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giuridica alternativa, che concepisce la natura come parte di una rete
interdipendente di relazioni e l’essere umano come componente dipendente
da un sistema complesso di elementi tra loro interconnessi.

Parole chiave: diritti della natura; comparazione giuridica;
costituzionalismo ambientale.

Since the 2000s, culturally and geographically distant legal systems within the so-
called Global South have recognized the legal subjectivity of elements of nature. A
thousand-year-old taboo has thus been broken, which reserved the exclusive right to
legal subjectivity to human beings and to entities that project their personality.
This innovation, rather singular from a Western perspective, represents a critical
response to the “corporate” vision of environmental law developed by the legal
systems of the Global North. The failure of environmental law, in its dual
international and administrative dimension, would reside in the inherent flexibility
of the protection of ecological integrity whenever economic interests come into play
in balancing operations. The anthropocentric approach of Western environmental
law would ultimately always end up sacrificing the protection of the Earth’s
biophysical balances in favor of the protection of economic reasons.
Emerging in contexts that have long been plundered of their natural riches during
colonial and neocolonial periods by the great imperial powers first and today by
global private powers, the rights of nature propose, on the contrary, an alternative
legal vision, which conceives nature as part of an interdependent network of
relationships and the human being as a dependent component of a complex system
of interconnected elements.

Keywords: rights of nature; legal comparison; environmental constitutionalism.

Il prototipo costituzionale: il caso dell’Ecuador

L
Ecuador è stato il primo Stato al mondo a riconoscere esplicitamente
’
i diritti della natura in Costituzione (2008). Tale scelta si inserisce nel
contesto del “nuovo costituzionalismo andino”, che valorizza le
tradizioni indigene e propone una visione inter-relazionale e ciclica della
convivenza umana e naturale. In questa prospettiva, l’ordinamento

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