This bill is a Rights of Nature initiative that provides legal protection for nature via giving rights to our watersheds.

It will:
a)  Secure legal rights for all watersheds within Lane County to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve including sustainable recharge, sufficient flows to protect native fish, and clean water unpolluted by corporate or governmental activities;
b)  Secure residents’ rights to accessible, clean, and affordable domestic drinking water free of harmful contamination;
c)  Prohibit corporations and government from violating these stated rights;
d)  Secure the right of residents to enforce these rights against corporations, government, or other business entities engaging in activities that violate these rights;
e) requires the government to adopt protective and effective measures to prevent and/or remedy actual and potential violation of the rights declared within this ordinance, even when there is not scientific certainty of the risk.

1. f)  Establish liability for damages to the watershed in proportion to the cost of restoration, and establish penalties for continuing violations in proportion to the cost of restoration;

2. f)  Provide protection and compensation for employees for reporting violations to the rights secured.

Current environmental regulatory structures are mostly about “permitting” certain harms to occur!

Corporate harms such as clear-cutting, mining, factory farming, fracking and the use of toxic chemicals. They act more to legalize harmful activity and other business entities than to protect our natural and human communities. 

Even though water is tested regularly in Lane County, under current law, if the water testing meets the current regulatory “standards”, which permit toxic chemicals and pollution, they will deem the water “clean”, while you and your families ingest “legal amounts” of toxic chemicals.

Watershed means the water and the land area that drains rain, snow, and groundwater into a single outlet, such as rivers, creeks, lakes, wetlands, aquifers and oceans. A watershed can be a few acres, such as a small pond, or hundreds of square miles as in rivers. 

• Healthy watersheds provide many ecosystem services that are essential to our social, environmental and economic well being, which include:
  • Nutrient cycling
  • Carbon storage
  • Erosion/sedimentation control
  • Water storage
  • Water filtration
  • Flood control
  • Soil formation
  • Wildlife movement corridors
  • Jobs 
  • Income
  • Recreation 
  • Food
  • Health and nutrition
  • Fire protection
  • Cooling 
  • Quality of life

Measure 20-373 would still be subject to a proportionality test in court, which evaluates whether a limitation on one right is necessary to protect another. When human rights and nature’s rights conflict, a court weighs the harms to the interests, then decides to balance them. Raging forest fires would take precedence over water use rights, because a decimated forest, damage to family homes and property, would take priority over the potential misuse of water to put out that fire. 

Timber and Ranching industries keep attempting to make taxpayers pay $7 million more annually for fighting fires so they can pay less. The proposed 2024 Oregon bill (Senate Bill 1593) luckily didn’t pass. Industrial timber-owned land and intensive logging increases the risk of severe wildfires, yet again big corporations try to skirt responsibility, which is why Measure 20-373 is needed. 

Healthy watersheds serve as one of the most effective climate adaptation strategies to mitigating wildfire risk and the increasingly common heat domes our region has experienced.

Under the current system of law in almost every country, nature is considered to be property. Something that is considered property confers upon the property owner the right to damage or destroy it. Thus, those who “own” wetlands, forestland, and other ecosystems and natural communities, are largely permitted to use them however they wish, even if that includes destroying the health and wellbeing of nature. 

Rights of Nature would recognize that ecosystems and natural communities are not merely property that can be owned. Rather, they are entities that have an independent and inalienable right to exist and flourish. 

Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature change the status of ecosystems and natural communities to be recognized and rights-bearing entities. 

Current environmental laws — including the federal Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and similar state laws — legalize environmental harms. They regulate how much pollution or destruction of nature can occur under law. Rather than preventing pollution and environmental destruction, our environmental laws allow and permit it. 

In addition, under commonly understood terms of preemption, once these activities are legalized by federal or state governments, local governments are prohibited from banning them. 

Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature begin with a different premise: Ecosystems and natural communities have the right to exist and flourish. People, communities, and governments have the authority to defend those rights on behalf of ecosystems and natural communities. 

When different human rights conflict, a court weighs the harms to the interests, then decides to balance them. This is called the proportionality test, which evaluates whether a limitation on one right is necessary to protect another. The same process happens when the Rights of Nature conflict with human rights. 

• • Example: Free Speech (Expression) vs. Privacy/Reputation 
    • Outcome: If the information is deemed high public interest (e.g., corruption), freedom of expression generally outweighs individual privacy 

Given that ecosystems and nature provide a life support system for humans, their interests must, at times, override other rights and interests. 

Many nations have expanded their body of legal rights to recognize a human right to a healthy environment. This includes Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, and Finland. Locally in the United States, Green Amendments, state-level constitutional rights to a healthy environment, including clean air and water, are found in the constitutions of Montana, Pennsylvania, and New York. 

Fulfilling the human right to a healthy environment is unachievable without a fundamental change in the relationship between humankind and nature. 

Implementing and fulfilling a true human right to a healthy environment is dependent on the health of the natural environment itself. This can only be achieved by securing the highest protections for the natural environment — by recognizing in law the right of the environment itself to be healthy and thrive.

Measure 20-373 is meant for corporations, not individuals

• Civil defense lawyers generally charge between $200 and $500 per hour with initial retainers ranging from $3,500 to $10,000 depending on case complexity. Do most average individuals have the finances to frivolously spend thousands over cans of coke and sunscreen?!

• Your piano teacher's lawn probably isn't large enough the treatment to harm an entire watershed. Her neighbor can try and bring action, but the courts would most likely dismiss it as frivolous because it wouldn't uphold to the standards at which our measure lays out.

Greenwashing highlights corporate efforts to present fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, or industrial agriculture as environmentally friendly through deceptive advertising, often targeting consumer, regulatory and public perception to prevent stronger climate action. 

Lack of campaign finance limits has enabled the timber industry to wield significant influence over state politics through large, unregulated donations. This allowed industry groups to heavily influence legislation, secure tax breaks, and shape environmental policies. 

The Bureau of Land Management is moving to update management plans for 2.5 million acres of public federal forests in western Oregon to significantly increase logging, aiming for production levels not seen since the 1960’s, further degrading the environment, while “maximizing timber production”, which would wreak havoc on local communities, water quality, and biodiversity. 

• • Federal policy would affect Private Forest Accord 2022 agreement, which protects over 10 million acres of private forestland via increased logging on adjacent federal lands, undermining the habitat connectivity or environmental goals the PFA was designed to protect in areas where federal and private lands are interspersed. 

Sacrificing the environment for economic gain to create jobs, boost local economies, and increase tax revenue for counties. This paves the way for big corporations to decimate the environment through Amazon warehouses, data centers, large industrial factory farming, and timber clear cutting. It is possible to have a healthy and robust economy, while protecting nature — communities don’t have to choose between the two. Citizens don’t want to live or visit communities that are polluted, decimated and destroyed. 

• Measure 20-373 promotes local democracy to protect our watershed and environment by the people who actually live in the community. 

Measure 20-373 uses precautionary principle to prevent harm before it occurs by looking at estimates of environmental impacts and stopping data centers from coming to our communities and using millions of gallons of water for cooling; water that needs to be used to protect communities from drought, forest fires, and degradation of the land. Measure 20-373 can stop harm before it occurs. 

Data centers are intensive users of local resources with U.S. facilities consuming roughly 176 terawatt-hours in 2023 — about 4.4% of annual electricity — expected to reach up to 12% by 2030. 

A single AI data center can consume as much energy as 100,000 homes, often requiring local infrastructure upgrades, drawing millions of gallons of water for cooling, and relying on on-site diesel generators. 

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For one thing, our laws currently do not adequately provide enough protection for nature to ensure our survival. Nature needs to have rights in itself in order for us to be sustainable and survive. Corporations and wealthy investors have more rights than the rest of us in our legal system. Corporations are considered “persons” under current law and have all the rights of us human “persons”, plus extra rights. Investors also have more rights under our laws than the rest of us, due to current legalities giving their privileged property special status and advantages. Within the context of this corrupted legal system, giving nature and our watersheds legal rights is not “crazy”, but instead is sane survival. Lets change this corrupt legal system and grant legal rights to nature!

In our current Oregon political climate, we can’t wait on political leaders who have consistently failed to protect our watersheds to finally do something effective. Climate change is coming upon us swiftly, as witnessed by decreasing rain and snow-pack, and longer droughts. Our so called “leaders” have failed to address it locally and regionally. We can do our part, and our local efforts do matter. We need to use peaceful, democratic and effective means – such as new local laws – to assert community rights and nature's rights that counter the dominance of corporate/ wealth profiteering interests at all levels. Our re-claiming democracy needs to start at the local level, where we have the most influence, and where we can more effectively counter those who favor treating us as a resource colony to extract wealth off of, and favor profits over people.

Yes it is. Our community rights efforts are part of a growing worldwide effort to establish laws that protect nature. These laws can protect rivers, watersheds, individual species or broader ecosystems. For example: a) municipalities in the U.S., including Pittsburgh, Toledo, and Santa Monica, have recently passed Rights of Nature laws to help protect human and non-human communities. b) Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico City now protect Rights of Nature in their constitutions. c) New Zealand treaty agreements have declared a river, national park, and sacred mountain as legal entities with “all the rights of a legal person.” and d) the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota which adopted the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice) law in December 2018 to help protect it from polluted water.

Corporations are currently treated as legal persons in court, separate from their owners, allowing them to sue, be sued, enter contracts, hold property. They possess certain constitutional rights, such as due process and free speech, but must be represented by an attorney in court proceedings. 

Nature deserves the same legal status as corporations. The rights of ecosystems and natural communities need to be enforceable independently of the rights of people who use them, the same way we treat corporations. That means that people within a community could step “into the shoes” of a mountain, stream, or forest ecosystem, and advocate for the rights of those natural communities. It calls for a system of jurisprudence in which those ecosystems are actually “seen” in court. 

State and Federal laws reflect the interests of corporations rights over the rights of people in local communities and nature. 

On a world stage, the 2015 Paris agreement was meant to be a legally binding international treaty aimed at limiting global warming to well below  2C, yet it faces intense criticism as “words without action” due to its reliance on voluntary national pledges (NDCs) with no enforcement mechanisms or penalties for non-compliance. 

• Oregon has set ambitious climate goals — including 45% below 1990 emission levels by 2035 and net-zero by 2050 — but is not currently on track to meet its 2035 target, due to rising demand from data centers and weakened federal vehicle standards. 

Local democracy law-making would allow for a mechanism of accountability to make sure that communities stay on track with climate goals by enforcing penalties for pollution or degradation of the environment. 

Vote Yes on Measure 20-373!

Rights of Nature movements are rising and beginning to take root across the globe. There are 668 reported nature protective initiatives in 60 countries, including 179 in the U.S., according to the EcoJuisprudence Monitor. 

• • In 2006, Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, banned the dumping of toxic sewage sludge as a violation of the Rights of Nature. Tamaqua is the first place in the world to recognize Rights of Nature in law. Since 2006, dozens of communities in ten states in the U.S. have enacted Rights of Nature laws. 
  • In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the Rights of Nature in its national constitution. In 2011, the first Rights of Nature court decision was issued in the Vilcabamba River case in Ecuador, upholding the Rights of Nature constitutional provisions. 
  • In 2014, the first Rights of Nature state constitutional amendment was proposed in Colorado. Efforts are now advancing in Ohio, New Hampshire, Oregon, and other states. 
  • In 2017, the New Zealand Parliament finalized the Te Awa Tupua Act, granting the Whanganui River legal status as an ecosystem. 
  • In 2017, Lafayette, Colorado, enacted the first Climate Bill of Rights, recognizing rights of humans and nature to a healthy climate, and banning fossil fuel extraction as a violation of those rights. 
  • In 2017, Colorado River v. State of Colorado was filed in U.S. federal court. In this first-in-the-nation lawsuit, an ecosystem sought recognition of its legal rights. 
  • In 2018, the White Earth band of the Chippewa Nation adopted the “rights of the Manoomin” law securing legal rights of manoomin, or wild rice, a traditional staple crop of the Anishinaabe people. This is the first law to secure legal rights of a particular plant species. 

Many economically and development driven citizens from the Eugene Chamber of Commerce, Realtors, and political members and commissioners who take funding from the timber industry.

In the 1990’s, Oregon’s powerful timber industry used its influence to win a series of tax cuts that have cost local governments a cumulative $3 billion. Once-vibrant communities were left struggling to pay for basic services without the taxes that once came from logging the valuable forests that surround them. (https://www.opb.org/article/2024/02/02/oregon-timber-industry-tax-cuts-legislature/)

Oregon’s forest sector employed 62,300 people in 2023, while outdoor recreation supports over 224,000 full - and part-time jobs across the state. Investing in a healthy environment is investing in our economy. 

We’ve seen this tactic before: corporations promise economic prosperity via tax revenue and job availability and work behind closed doors with lawmakers to receive tax cuts and local jobs disappear with dramatic advances in automation. 

Amazon warehouses and data centers are aggressively automating their operations, aiming to automate 75% of operations by 2033, potentially reducing reliance on 600,000 manual roles. 

Measure 20-373 promotes local democracy by empowering communities to have a voice in what corporations can take foothold in their county and stop destruction and pollution from harming the watershed.

This section of Measure 20-373 has been weaponized as not using sound science to prove harm. 

• • Ordinance, section (d) Right to Prosecute and Remedy Violations:
    • (2) to require the government to adopt protective and effective measures to prevent and/or remedy actual and potential violation of the rights declared within this ordinance, even when there is not scientific certainty or full evidence of the risk. 

The law was written based on the precautionary principle, used by the EU, that dictates that protective action should be taken against threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, even if scientific certainty regarding cause and effect is lacking. It shifts focus from managing harm to preventing it. 

• • Argues action should not be delayed by a lack of complete scientific evidence when potential hazards are identified.
  • Shifts the responsibility of proof from those arguing against an activity to the developers, who must prove their activities are not harmful. 
  • Actions taken should be proportional to the potential risk, allowing for measures ranging from monitoring to a total ban. 
  • International Recognition: landmark formulation is found in Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration, which states that where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. 

Measure 20-373 would still be subject to a proportionality test in court, which evaluates whether a limitation on one right is necessary to protect another. When human rights and nature’s rights conflict, a court weighs the harms to the interests, then decides to balance them. For example, if taking down a dam would flood and cause extensive damage to housing and property, a court would rule to preserve a dam until an alternative was found to remove a dam without providing unnecessary harm to human beings.

• What dams provide to local communities:
  • Hydroelectric power: renewable electricity without the need for fossil fuels
  • Flood control: regulate downstream water flow during heavy rainfall, reducing damage to property, infrastructure and crops
  • Water supply and irrigation: reservoirs store vast amounts of water for drinking, municipal, industrial, and agricultural use, ensuring a steady supply during dry periods. 

• How dams are disruptive to the environment and local communities:
  • Disruption of river flow and ecosystems: change natural water temperatures
  • Habitat fragmentation and biodiversity loss: physical barriers that obstruct migration of fish and other aquatic organisms, causing decline in fish populations and overall biodiversity
  • Sediment trapping and erosion: block natural, nutrient-rich sediment flow downstream. Sediment buildup in reservoir reduces storage capacity, while lack of sediment downstream causes riverbank and coastal erosion. 
  • Greenhouse gas emissions: reservoirs can become a major source of methane as submerged vegetation decays 
  • Water loss and quality issues: large surface area of reservoirs leads to immense water loss through evaporation compared to flowing rivers. Stagnant water can have lower dissolved oxygen and accumulate pollutants, leading to algae blooms, harmful to humans using the water and aquatic life. 
  • Land submergence: creation of large reservoirs flood vast areas of land, destroying natural habitats and agricultural land. 

Measure 20-373 does not directly impact local development in Lane County. All these municipalities maintain robust and strict building codes and regulations that guide the construction process independently of county-level watershed protections. 

Low-income housing we desperately need would be more resilient as environmental conditions improve. 

A balance needs to be struck between desire for safe and durable development against the need for affordable, rapidly produced housing. 

Collaboration can occur between developers and Measure 20-373 by finding creative solutions to mitigate environmental impact, such as green infrastructure (green roofs and permeable pavements to manage water and reduce heat), urban greening (increased parks and tree cover), and transit-oriented development to minimize vehicle use.  

People have been discussing “sustained development” for decades, little has been done to change the structure of law to achieve that goal. Laws recognizing the Rights of Nature finally codify the concept of sustainable development. They disallow activities that would interfere with the functioning of natural systems that support human and natural life. 

There is nothing unusual about courts determining remedies when rights are violated. That’s a routine function of the judicial system. Damages are not “one size fits all” — they are assessed case by case, based on the severity of harm and the facts involved. Suggesting otherwise misrepresents how the legal system works and fuels unnecessary fear.

Read the Ordinance- Section 3 Enforcement

The proposal is not vague — it’s fundamental.

Framing these protections as “vague” attempts to create doubt where the principle of watershed protection is straightforward and widely understood. All fundamental rights are broad by design so they can respond to new threats. This law clearly states that "harms” are incurred by corporations, government and business entities, not individual county residents.

Lane County residents will not be sued under this law.

Current laws regulate pollution rather than prohibit it outright. Toxic chemicals in our watersheds and water supplies pose measurable risks to communities.The real danger is pollution, not protection. It is reasonable to promote stronger protections that are long overdue to safeguard public health and the environment. 

There are 668 reported Nature protective initiatives in 60 countries, including 179 in the US, according to the EcoJurisprudence Monitor.