By Nina Purton
The air was sharp and cool as I cycled the Innocent Railway path, tracing a line from Central Edinburgh to Newcraighall, where I was staying during the summer. It’s a journey I made countless times, but one evening still comes to mind when I think about this period. I was pedalling under the canopy of trees and between thick bushes, the bustling city fading behind me as I cycled away from the urban centre into the quiet wilderness, when I stopped, breath held tight in my chest in a moment of wonder. Standing just metres from me, beneath the glow of the twilight, was a stray deer. It paused, majestic and elegant, to look in my direction before silently melting back into the shadows.
That fleeting encounter, a moment of vibrant, wild biodiversity nested within the arteries of a major city, stuck with me for days. It was a potent, wonder-filled reminder of nature’s tenacious presence and its precious existence in urban environments where it is constantly threatened.
Introducing Monica Feria-Tinta
This sense of urgency and profound connection to the natural world that underpinned my conversation with British-Peruvian lawyer, Monica Feria-Tinta, whom I met in the hotel she was staying at in central Edinburgh a couple of days later.
As the first Latin American lawyer to qualify at the English bar, her journey is a complex and interwoven with deep reinterpretations of existing legal frameworks and essential human understandings of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ to include the environment within the legal equation. Having sharpened her skills working with international tribunals, the UN, and the Inter-American System of Human Rights on critical issues like genocide, crimes against humanity, and systemic torture, Feria-Tinta has honed in on one of the existential questions of our time: can human life flourish if nature is destroyed?
A pivotal moment that cemented her trajectory was being awarded the prestigious Diploma of the Hague Academy of International Law in 2020, a first for a Peruvian lawyer in the academy’s 50-year history. This achievement provided the confidence to launch her impactful international career, built on a simple yet profound premise: ‘You have to know the rules before you understand how you can develop them.’
Can Human Justice Be Separated from Natural Justice?
For Monica, the path to representing the environment effectively wasn’t about tearing up the rulebook. It was about taking her broad legal skills and focusing them on a crucial re-interpretation of existing laws. This meant reading agreements like the Paris Agreement and human rights treaties to understand how they must respond to the climate crisis.
When we spoke about the burning question of whether human justice can be separated from natural justice, her response was clear:
‘It’s a good question why human rights and environment were separated as fields,’ she says, ‘there’s no other way but within the environment, within the natural world. There cannot be a situation where you harm the natural world, and yet you can claim that you are protecting human life.’
She firmly argues that we don’t necessarily need entirely new laws. Instead, the answers are already within the parameters of the laws we currently have, if only we approach them correctly – a mission she has pursued vigorously since 2016.
Can We Trust the Law to do ‘right’?
Ideas of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have always been at the heart of humanity’s political struggles, cultures and literature. They are also often slippery terms that are hard to pin down and change over time. As humanity grows and learns from major historical happenings like slavery, the holocaust and even present-day genocides, so does our understanding of justice and morality. This brings into question how fair and effective our legislative systems actually are, and who they are designed to represent.
Currently, the UK operates under a ‘cab rank rule’ that supposedly functions much like a taxi system, offering to serve all individuals and organisations waiting in line regardless of personal interests, be they fossil fuel companies, organisations representing nature, or climate protesters. But taxis can be inaccessible to those who cannot afford them, and lawyers, known to be expensive, can be even harder to reach. Although solicitors and barristers have the discretionary option to lower their prices for those who need it, it is not an obligation. This has raised some concerns among the current generation of professional advocates and people seeking legal representation.
A recent wave of lawyers, including Joylon Maugham, Director of the Good Law Project, have refused to prosecute climate protesters because they understand that today’s law, just as the ‘law of yesterday’, can indeed be wrong in that it sanctions and preserves the biased interests of a minority that are unfair and/or immoral. We have many great examples of laws that restricted the freedom of groups like women and people of African heritage, going as far as removing their human status and classifying them as property. This has permitted privileged minorities to perform racial and misogynistic violence on a massive scale throughout history.
There remains much legwork to ensure our laws protect the freedom and rights of individuals of all genders and ethnicities, yet it is a topic that has been explored and reflected over the years in our judicial systems. But when it comes to the rights of nature, our laws and government still enable, if not facilitate, violence against nature (fossil fuel companies in the UK still benefit from £17.5 billion in subsidies and support per year). Maugham firmly believes that to prosecute climate protesters would mean to sanction the activities of fossil fuel giants, which cause damage to natural ecosystems and inevitably to human life and property.
Monica, on the other hand, reads history in a different light. As a witness to Alberto Fujimori‘s dictatorship in 90s, she feels strongly about the principle of equal access to representation that the English law operates under. She even interprets the relatively recent legal recognition of women’s right to vote and education as testimony to the law’s capacity to change. She also sees leverage in the fact that the law assigns legal status to non-living organisations like companies. This proves the law has the potential to transform and represent non-human entities.
“We have to decide what is fundamental to protect and what has to be represented,” she tells me. “And I’d say nature needs that at this point in time.”
This is a choice for society to make, she tells me. For future generations, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Monica warns that unless we develop a system of law that can genuinely protect nature, the consequences might be irreversible. But more than resisting or endorsing current structures, she suggests that change lies deeper, within but also beyond the legislative system. She believes a paradigm shift is needed across society for a more profound understanding of the intrinsic value of nature. It is this vehement belief that led Monica to become the first professional advocate to successfully represent nature’s right to exist in a landmark case.
The Los Cedros Case and the Limits of ‘People-Centric’ Laws
Monica admits her journey has faced significant friction, primarily what she calls ‘the fundamental, anthropocentric nature of the law.’ This is the deep-seated legal custom of prioritising human life and interests above all other forms of life. Monica sees this as a fundamental misunderstanding, reminding us that ‘we are a part of nature.’
She sees the law beginning to repair this through jurisprudential developments, but stresses the required change is bigger: we need to ‘correct the paradigm under which we are operating, we need an ecocentric look.’ This shift is essential to stop practices that destroy the Earth and, by extension, ourselves. Yet, she is convinced this can be achieved within existing frameworks, a topic she explores in her book A Barrister for the Earth.
Her encounter with the conventional limits of law came sharply into focus with the Los Cedros case in Ecuador (2020). The case involved a state-approved mining project that would have devastated a critical natural area, legally recognised as a Key Biodiversity Area (KBA). The reserve encompasses nearly 12,000 acres of cloud forest, is home to endangered species such as spider monkeys, rare fauna, and serves as the source of four precious watersheds.
Monica considers this one of the most important cases of the century because it forced legal frameworks to look beyond people to consider nature’s right to preservation. While many of her previous cases had involved representing nature alongside human communities, this one had a critical distinguishing feature: ‘there were no human beings living there.’ For this reason, very little had been done to evaluate the land before approving the mining project. She recalls asking herself the quintessential question: Is it right to wipe out an entire natural landscape, including unique species, if no people are directly displaced? This was an ‘aha moment’ that solidified her understanding of the law’s conventional, anthropocentric practice: the system’s focus is almost entirely on how people are affected by changes, ignoring the human decisions that impact nature itself.
Fortunately, Ecuador’s constitution directly prohibited actions that would harm endemic species, and the court ruled in favour of preserving the forest. This case enhanced her conviction that the law needs to fundamentally shift its focus from just people to the entire planet as the larger whole to which we belong.
Rethinking Development
I couldn’t help but ask whether Monica thought we might be on track to meet climate goals. ‘We are under a lot of pressure,’ she tells me, ‘I think this question is not just a fancy question, it is an existential question. And that’s why it’s so urgent.’
Grappling with the sheer scale of global waste (the UK generated 191.2 million tonnes in 2020), we both agreed that our current model of development needs a rethink. Monica has come to a stark conclusion: ‘Clearly, the level of pollution that we have reached cannot possibly be our ideal of development.’ This is particularly true when considering how extensive and damaging our waste streams are: from enduring materials like plastic to toxic forever chemicals that permeate various products ranging from textiles to non-stick pans, personal care and medical products and more.
Monica’s experience with indigenous communities has led her to question the essence of development itself. She learned a different way of viewing progress, one that respects life and prioritises the peace of mind that comes from knowing you have access to clean, unpolluted water, for example. ‘If you cannot have that in this model, then why should we pursue that model? It’s not pro-life,’ she asserts.
She recalls a visit to the South American indigenous Bora community when she was younger. She remembers observing that these people consume resources according to their basic needs, and that she had the explicit impression that they seemed happy. What she saw contrasted sharply with the aggressive, ever-expanding growth model prevalent in the West. To have money in a bank account is not necessarily what establishes a good life, she notes. Many indigenous cultures don’t align with the Western life model, and she asks, ‘Why is that wrong?’ Perhaps this idea of endless growth is more of a myth than a true path to prosperity.
How Do We Move Forward?
While celebrating the power of technology to connect us, Monica acknowledges it has fueled a culture of constant, unhealthy consumption. Her call to action is to reassess our place in the world and how we relate to the Earth.
She argues that this process of self-exploration is vital and inseparable from the rapidly rising mental health concerns in Western civilisation. ‘What is it that makes us really human?’ she asks. It’s not technological advancement; she believes we have a biological drive to commune with nature, ‘that is at the very core of what it means to be a human being.’ And today’s scientific findings are also echoing this.
She is hopeful, celebrating that many people are actively seeking out alternative ways to live on the planet. She sees this moment as a potential enlightenment in human and environmental consciousness, an opportunity to make important decisions, to adapt as a species to the needs of our environment, which are, by default, our own needs.
What Can We Do Now?
As immediate, everyday steps, Monica encourages us to investigate our consumer choices. We must move away from autopilot and deeply question a product’s origins and its complete lifecycle, including the impact of its pre-consumer processes and post-life on our immediate and extended body, the planet. A small but significant gesture is to avoid single-use, disposable plastics.
She reflects on her Peruvian roots, recalling her family’s straw market bag, a possession they would tend to and repair for generations. The concept of recycling was foreign because a culture of repair and care for objects was simply native. This deep sense of value, often born out of necessity, is what we need to relearn. Against this backdrop, she remembers her amazement at the amount of plastic bags handed out at supermarkets when she first arrived in the UK. Reusable bags are a much more common sight today, but those supermarket bags distributed since the 70s remain in our environment because they linger for decades and even centuries.
‘Unless you’ve had experiences of hunger, perhaps it takes further education to become aware of the value of food,’ Monica suggests.
This statement is powerful, encouraging us to reflect on the leap in consciousness we need today. Can we learn to value the planet’s resources not out of necessity, but out of a wish to understand and cherish the beautifully balanced processes that keep us alive?
Ultimately, she suggests an everyday practice of self-awareness and gratitude. To stop and truly appreciate the value of a local river, the shade of a tree, or the simple resources that support our lives. Small gestures go a long way, and remind us just how much our environment provides that benefits us.
Discovering this value, we can also look back to understand what our ancestors valued. Out of this, we can shape a vocabulary and play for the next generations, one that builds a personal, profound relationship with nature’s biodiversity, creating memories that make nature’s processes inseparable from our vision of the future. Most importantly, this view lays the foundation to protect the environment from a sense of deep gratitude and care, something our planet and climate debate urgently yearns for.
About the Author
As a sustainability, innovative materials and well-being writer, Nina Purton is an avid investigator of all things circular. She is set on researching behavioural patterns, pioneering materials and initiatives that are revolutionising the way we produce, consume, and relate to other human beings and the natural environment.
You can find out more about her on her LinkedIn profile and website.
