Taking an Oath for Nature with Paul Powlesland
Merging Advocacy and Law to Give Nature a Voice.
Paul Powlesland is a UK-based barrister and co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, an organization dedicated to reimagining the legal system to recognize and protect the inherent rights of the natural world. Through legal advocacy, policy reform, and governance innovation, the organization is at the forefront of a paradigm shift, working to ensure that ecosystems and species are granted legal standing and a voice in decision-making processes.
With a deep personal connection to the environment, Powlesland lives on a narrowboat along the River Roding in East London, where he leads the River Roding Trust in its mission to restore and protect the waterway. As a key figure in the Rights of Nature movement, he advocates for granting legal personhood to natural entities, aiming to transform the relationship between law and the environment. Beyond his legal work, he actively participates in protests and has contributed to drafting Rights of Rivers declarations, using both advocacy and direct action to inspire a broader responsibility for protecting and restoring the natural world.
This interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.
INL: You swore your juror’s oath—a formal promise to judge a case fairly—on your local river, recognizing it as sacred. For those unfamiliar with this oath, it’s typically sworn on a religious text or through a secular affirmation. Choosing your river instead was a powerful statement. Can you share what that moment meant to you and how it reflects your journey in defending nature?
Paul: Yeah, it was a very powerful moment for me—bringing both my advocacy for nature and also my legal knowledge. Making it very public. It felt very powerful.
It was actually a bit of a last-minute decision in some ways. I was on my way to court the morning I was called for jury service, and was thinking about the oath I was going to take—was I going to swear on the Bible or do a civil affirmation? And it just kind of came to me that actually the thing that would be the most meaningful for me would be swearing on my river.
So I cycled back to the river to get some water from it. When we were being called into court, the usher was asking us which holy book we wanted to swear on. I said I wanted to swear on my river. He looked a bit perplexed and went in to speak with the judge.
The judge called me into the courtroom and said, "Well, I hear you want to swear the oath on your river, Mr. Powlesland, and I confess we haven't had that before. Can you give us more information?" I explained that to me, nature is sacred—it is what I would best approximate to me as some small 'g' god. Also how, in the same way that Christians profess their belief through Christian charity, I profess my belief in the sacredness and importance of my river through the works that I do on it. You can't say I don't profess my love for the river in looking after it—giving up huge amounts of my time to go and care for it. I told them this would be a promise that was meaningful for me.
There was a bit of legal back and forth, but they agreed to it. A few minutes later, I poured out the water from the bottle I had from the river, into a little plastic cup, put my fingers in it, and gave the oath:
"I swear by the River Roding, from her source in Molehill Green to her confluence with the River Thames, that I will try the case and give a true verdict according to the evidence."

I didn’t expect it to have quite the impact that it did. It was just an idea I had, but it seemed to capture people's imagination—a way of expressing a relationship to nature that, I think, more people feel than we generally hear of in our society.
INL: What inspired you to start Lawyers for Nature, and is there a case that stands out where you or your team successfully defended a place or community?
Paul: Yeah, it's a slightly long story. Up until 2017, I had been looking for ways to bring my increasing love and care for nature into my legal work. I got involved with the campaign to save trees in the city of Sheffield, England, where the council wanted to cut down thousands of trees. Local people rose up against them to stop it, and I worked with that campaign for a couple of years, representing them in a number of cases, advising, and helping them. They eventually won that campaign through incredible campaigning and tenacity, with some people standing under trees, giving up their lives for a couple of years to protect them. In the end, they saved those trees—the council lost and backed down.
That whole experience taught me that the current legal system did not adequately represent nature or those trying to protect it. So I set up an organization. It was going to be called Lawyers for Trees, but then I thought I’d go a bit wider—Lawyers for Nature—to try and represent local groups who wanted to protect nature. We were instantly swamped, trying to do it voluntarily in our spare time. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of cases in England alone of local groups trying to protect nature and needing legal representation, and we just couldn't do it; it was impossible.
Through that, I also realized that just doing that aspect would mean constantly firefighting, trying to prevent the worst excesses of the current system. And actually what we needed was something deeper. Clearly, the foundations, the underlying basis of our legal system, is wrong in how it relates to nature. That’s how I then got into the Rights of Nature movement. Lawyers for Nature pivoted more toward imagining a different way that law and lawyers could relate to nature—and trying to make that imagination a reality.
We still do some cases of direct nature protection, where that case will give a broader example of why the law is currently wrong, how it relates to nature, and how it could be different. The most obvious example I can give is in a place called Wellingborough in England. A developer wanted to chop down dozens of trees that formed one of the longest avenues of lime trees in the country. Again, local people resisted but were largely ignored by the authorities. They asked for my legal help.
I got the request last thing on a Sunday night. I was about to go to bed and thought, "I’ll do it another day," but I realized, firstly, that they were correct—these trees legally should have been protected, so it would be a criminal offense to chop them down. And second, they were about to be chopped down the next day. So, I wrote an advice letter stating that it would be illegal to cut these trees down and gave it to the protesters, thinking that would stop it. But I heard the next day, as I came out of court from another case, that not only was the developer chopping the trees down, but the police were actively helping them do that.
Just to reiterate what that meant—the police were actively helping a developer commit a criminal offense in destroying nature. Which is wild. And I was so pissed off at this.
My case the next day settled, so I decided to go up to Wellingborough, which is quite a long way north of London, a good hour’s travel, to explain this in person to the police. So I went there, stayed overnight, and in the morning, I went up to the police officer to explain my advice: "Here’s my legal reasoning. Do you disagree with any of this? Do you agree these trees are legally protected, and you should be arresting the developer rather than the protesters?"

And they said, "We’re not here to take sides."
A few minutes later, I saw them walking over to us with intent clearly to move us away, if not arrest—which they then tried to do. They said: “If anyone stands under these trees, they will be arrested if you don’t move”. In that moment, I had a choice. A lot of lawyers would just be like “well, I’ve written my legal advice, maybe I’ll bring a case about this in a few months time. But as a lawyer for nature, my choice is different. I am there to do whatever I can legally and peacefully to protect those trees. And I knew that it would be illegal to fell them. And I knew once they were felled, it was too late to bring them back. You can never undo that damage—at least not in our lifetimes. So, without really planning it, I found myself climbing the tree. I was struggling as it was quite cold so I couldn't get a grip, and then a resident shoved me on the bum and I found myself up in the canopy of the tree. Much to the surprise of me, local residents, and the police. It was a strange turn of events. This direct action. But you also need to weave all these elements together—law, direct action, campaigning. Instead of just saying, "No, no, no, you can’t get me," I thought, "Right, I need to use this to do whatever I can to magnify the campaign to save these trees."
So I went straight on Twitter. Luckily, I had my phone on me in the tree—didn’t have much food, water, or warm clothing, but I had my phone. So I wrote a tweet thread where I told the story, literally screenshotting my legal advice so anyone could see whether I was correct or not. Then I explained: "I’m a barrister, and I find myself 25 feet up in the air in a tree. How did this happen?" I told the story of the trees that had been destroyed the day before, the illegal actions of the police, screenshotted the advice, and pressed send.
It then went viral—it got millions of views around the world. It caused the police and local council’s social media departments to melt down. The police put me under arrest while I was in the tree, but I refused to come down until I was assured the tree wouldn’t be felled. That went on all day, until I nearly had hypothermia because it was so cold. Eventually, the head of the council came down and brokered an agreement between me and the police: if I came down, they wouldn’t fell the tree that week, and they would only arrest me on the roadside, not take me into the police station.
So I came down.
The next morning, someone else occupied the tree. I got bail conditions from the police stating that I wasn’t allowed to climb any tree in Northamptonshire (the county in North England where these trees are located), which was quite funny. Then I went to a meeting—put my lawyer hat back on and went as a lawyer representing the tree protesters to a meeting with the council that day to put a moratorium on the felling of the tree, which they agreed to.
Then, a lot of the attention which I’d helped to bring to the campaign really fired up the local campaigners, and they ran an amazing campaign. In the end, they raised £60,000 to bring a judicial review, challenging the council’s decision to allow the trees to be felled. A year later, that case was heard in the High Court. The judge agreed with my advice and said yes, it was illegal to fell those trees, and they shouldn't have been felled. And they’re still standing now.
I like to tell that story because it illustrates so many of the different elements of what being a lawyer for nature means—and why it differs from being an environmental lawyer. If you’re an environmental lawyer, you write your advice about law—this is what environmental law says, you click send, and you don’t really care what happens next.
For me, it’s about using whatever tools I have at hand to advocate, protect, and care for nature. If that means writing legal advice with my little legal hat on, I’ll do that. If it means going to a meeting as a lawyer, I’ll put my little legal hat on. But I’m also happy to put my campaigner hat on, my direct action hat on, and peacefully do what I need to do to protect nature.
INL: As you’ve shared, you don’t just advocate for nature in the courtroom—you also actively restore and protect it. With the River Roding Trust, you’ve been helping to bring new life to a local waterway. What made this river special to you, and how are you helping to restore it?
Paul: I didn't realize the impact that my work on River Roding1 was going to have on my Rights of Nature lawyer work. I originally just moved there in 2017 because I wanted a permanent place to more my boat. I had lived on a boat for five years before that. And also a place to maybe do a little bit of environmental improvement work—maybe a little litter pick and some tree planting.
Little did I know what I was opening myself up to. The River Roding is very special—I’ve realized that over time—but what makes it special to me is the connection that I have with it. I believe that something very deep, meaningful, and special happens when a human spends a lot of time, on different occasions, connecting with and to a specific part of nature. You really enter into a deeper, magical relationship with that place.
I think a river is particularly easy to do that with because you can literally immerse yourself in it. I don’t just swim in it—I immerse myself in it—bathe in the birdsong, the feeling of the sun through the reeds, and the rustling of the trees. It is all a deep part of my being now. I never expected this journey to happen in the way that it has, but unknowingly, I was entering into a process which I now roughly see as one of becoming a nature guardian, which is knowledge of and connecting to a specific part of nature, leading to deep feelings of love for that place. I think that those two things happen quite naturally. When you truly get to know a part of nature, human beings are hardwired to love it. And that feeling of love leads to a deep desire to protect, care for, and restore it. Because how can you love something that you allow to be damaged? Or allow it to continue to be in a damaged condition? You can’t. I know I can’t abide it in my soul, to see my river being damaged.
That was the journey I was entering into, but I didn’t know when I started out that was what I was doing, but it’s happening. It has been the hardest journey I’ve ever gone on, but also the most beautiful and fulfilling. The work is not easy. Living where I live is not easy. It’s a very challenging area of London.
The River Roding, for those who don’t know, is a river in East London. It’s the third biggest river in London, generally quite unknown. Most Londoners have never even heard of it. It has been quite abandoned and forgotten, with lots of problems. It runs through densely populated areas, places of poverty, and landscapes marked by post-industrial destruction.
But it’s also a magical place. Because it sits on the edge of London, property developers haven’t come right up to it yet. So it still has these areas that are kind of abandoned and have been taken back by nature. With just a few interventions—removing rubbish, planting trees, restoring water to the marsh—it magically bounces back. It’s been a real joy to witness that. To be, not only a part of it, but in some ways directly making that happen. It’s been incredible. I think it’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in my life.
INL: In recent years, we've seen an increase in legal crackdowns on environmental activism, from stricter protest laws to SLAPP2 lawsuits. What patterns have you noticed in how the legal system is being used against activists, and how can they best protect themselves?
Paul: The law is often being used to crack down on anyone trying to protect nature, and also simultaneously, the laws against those destroying nature are often not enforced, which is very fascinating. The water companies are not prosecuted for illegally putting sewage into rivers, but tree campaigners who are lawfully trying to protect a tree are being arrested.
And I find that quite fascinating. Even in cases where it's not a criminal offence to fell trees—the police will often still come along to help, almost as private security, to help private developers and keep protesters away. I don't entirely know how people can protect themselves from that because the police are often ignoring the law and cracking down on protests.
A key thing to me is, number one, always act peacefully. I think if ever violence is brought in, it always devalues protest in other people's eyes. And to make the forms of activism you do, speak powerfully to other people, so that it makes it harder to crack down on them. Standing under a tree that needs to be felled is a very symbolic, powerful thing. Even people who don't like environmental hippies find the sight of people being arrested merely for standing under a tree to be, I think, often quite a difficult thing to observe. In my experience of seeing reactions on social media, there are far fewer calls for crackdowns on people protecting trees by sitting underneath them than there are for, say, blocking motorways for climate protests.
And there's such a powerful image in the person saying, "I love this tree, or this part of nature, so much that I am going to protect it, even if that currently breaks the law." That's a powerful statement. I think it protects people from, maybe from arrest, but also from the worst consequences of arrest. You’re much less likely to be jailed or have significant consequences against you if your action is peaceful and speaks to a powerful relationship of love, care, and protection towards nature. There's a kind of powerful soulfulness to it that I think is very visible, that people can see. I'm not saying it will always protect you from consequences—you may still be arrested, you may still be convicted of things—but in general, the consequences are going to be much less in those kinds of cases of powerful nature protection, I find.
INL: Legal victories in this realm, often depend on public awareness and grassroots support. What can everyday people do to help strengthen legal protections for nature?
Paul: I think there are two levels that people can act on—local and national—and the two interact with each other. I do think that it really adds to people's strength as campaigners and advocates for nature if they have a specific place or part of nature they're advocating for.
For me, I know that when I talk on national issues—whether it's tree destruction, sewage in rivers, or development, whatever it may be—having the specific examples I can give from the River Roding has made the activism way more powerful. It’s not just talking in the abstract anymore; it's giving specifics. I’ll be asked, "Why are environmental laws failing? They're fine.” and I’ll say, “Well, here's a dozen examples in the Roding where the current law doesn't protect the structure of the river or stop its destruction.”
It's really useful to have, so I really would recommend entering into that relationship of care and guardianship of a specific place and beginning to do the practical work of protecting it in all the different ways it needs to be done. That work informs activism. But we also need to work on a national level because, ultimately, if you just protect one part of it, like I just protect my river—climate change will still destroy it. The overall destruction of nature in this country [England] will destroy my river as well.
So, I do need to work on national issues, but I’d say you kind of loop back and forth. National activism informs local, and local activism tells you what issues need to be addressed nationally.
As an example, on the Roding, I saw lots of rubbish on the river, so I went to go and pick that out. One of the biggest things I do is take rubbish out of the river. Those actions—directly taking rubbish out—give me credibility to speak because people know I'm not just wanging on about philosophy. I'm out there—physically—almost every weekend at this time of year, every single weekend, out there, giving up my free time doing incredibly physically grueling work because I love my river. There's no greater demonstration of that love and care.
But equally, that amount of rubbish on my river has taught me that we need national solutions. I can’t just keep picking up rubbish forever, every year. It keeps on coming back. So we need a national scheme, a deposit return scheme, and national policies to stop the amount of material going in the environment in the first place. Then I campaign for that. And when people ask, "Why do we need this [scheme/policy]?" I can say, "Well, here's a picture of me standing among sh*t tons of rubbish on my river."
Almost every issue is like that. It’s what I would call having a balanced activism diet—local and national, micro and macro—looping between the two and using both to strengthen your campaign.
The other crucial thing is that everyone really has a role. I do a lot of different roles on my river, from desk-based campaigning around planning applications to physically going and getting rubbish out of the river. Everyone can play a different role.
Younger, more physically fit people might want to get out there, plant trees, and remove rubbish. Older people who may not be as physically active might want to do the campaigning around stopping harmful development through the planning system. Naturally, some might find that boring and prefer to do more desk-based work, like gathering signatures on a petition.
I really believe that everyone has a role to play. And although I have some advantages being a lawyer, that doesn’t mean what I’ve done is something other people can’t do. I'm not ecologically trained. I've never studied environmental law. I just started doing this, and everyone can do a lot of what I’ve done on my river in terms of looking after it. And I would really urge people to do it. A, because we need it. We really need you. Nature needs you. Nature needs you to stand up at this time. We are in a pivotal moment where much stands to be destroyed, and the actions of ordinary people standing up and caring for nature really do make a difference.
We really need you. Nature needs you. Nature needs you to stand up at this time.
But also because, as I said at the start, it is amongst the most fulfilling, difficult, but uplifting things you can do with your life. It really is a beautiful thing to do, even if the day-to-day stuff is quite hard.
INL: The UK and the USA have different legal systems, but both face challenges when it comes to protecting nature. Are there legal strategies or frameworks from the UK that could be applied in the US, or vice versa?
Paul: The American and British systems are different. But actually, in terms of the relationships of those systems to nature, the problem is actually pretty similar. The problem is the underlying societal relationship to nature that fundamentally regards nature as a mere, dead resource to be used for human ends.
And that idea—actually, we've got a lot of responsibility in Britain for exporting that around the world, and to America as well. I mean, it's hard to say exactly where it came from, but it definitely has significant origins in British common law traditions. There was an 18th-century legal textbook by a man called Blackstone3, who effectively said that nature is the common property of all mankind by the gift of the creator, and we have the right to expropriate it. I believe this is the underlying cause of the current destructive relationship to nature that legal systems have around the world. That legal textbook was essential in establishing laws in common law jurisdictions globally, including America.
So the fundamental idea is the same. And therefore, the fundamental solution is the same. Obviously, the laws, individual regulations, and ways of implementation might be slightly different, but the fundamental solution is the same: we need to change that underlying idea to recognize that nature is alive, that nature has its own interests, and it is more than just a resource to be used and abused by humans.
The way we do that is through Rights of Nature. These rights can be broadly broken down into two main themes. First, substantive rights—laws that grant actual rights to nature, like the right to restoration, the right not to be damaged to a point of destruction that it can’t regenerate from—in the case of rivers, the right to flow or the right not to be polluted.
Second, we need procedural rights. Nature must be represented in our legal system, to have what’s called legal personality—the right to sue and be sued in our legal system—and guardians to represent its interests in our legal system. At the moment, fictional entities like companies, which don’t exist at all—things we made up in the 19th century, have the right to be heard in our legal system, but nature, which actually exists and upon which we fundamentally rely on for our own existence, does not have that right. To me, that is mad, and we need to change it.
The interesting thing about jurisdictions is that this is already happening in common law jurisdictions. New Zealand, which has a legal system very similar to the UK and, to some extent, the U.S., has passed an act in parliament to give legal personality, self-ownership, and guardians to the Whanganui River in 2017. More recently, two mountains have been granted the same status, one just last month. So, there’s now 3 natural bodies in New Zealand that have legal personality and guardianship. So, we know it’s possible within common law systems.
The key thing is political will. In New Zealand, that was provided by the presence of the Māori people, who demand that their sacred rivers, mountains, and places be removed from human ownership and given legal personality. In countries that don’t have a strong Indigenous presence, we must step into that role and demand it ourselves—become guardians of nature, grow to understand the truth that nature is sacred, nature is alive, and we are its custodians, as humans. And then campaign to make that a reality.
In countries that don’t have a strong Indigenous presence, we must step into that role and demand it ourselves—become guardians of nature, grow to understand the truth that nature is sacred, nature is alive, and we are its custodians, as humans.
And also crucially, not just campaign to make it a reality, but live as if it’s already a reality. We can all do that. On the River Roding, there’s no legal thing that says I can be its guardian. People often ask me, “How do you become a guardian of the Roding?” I rocked up and did it—just said I was the guardian and started acting like one. And now, fight, fight, fight for my river as its guardian, and profess that belief through things like the River Oath. What was special about that was that it was a real sign to others that I treat the river as sacred.
INL: How does Lawyers for Nature help bring about a new relationship between law and nature?
Paul: Yes, so there's an interesting thing in the UK: the political reality is that we are probably not going to get new laws passed by Parliament to give rights to nature anytime soon. The amazing act was passed by the New Zealand Parliament for the Whanganui River—that's unlikely to happen for one of our rivers anytime soon.
So, Lawyers for Nature have been trying to creatively brainstorm and imagine ways to bring about a new way of relating to nature—a new rights of nature paradigm—within the current legal system voluntarily. So, thinking of ways within the current system, how can we change the relationship between the law and nature?
One of the ways is called Nature on the Board, where we worked with a company called Faith in Nature to put a nature director on the board of a company for the first time. The crucial thing was that this was possible within the current legal framework. The Companies Act in the UK allowed it to happen. As long as the company wanted to do it, it was completely legally possible without any change in the law at all. And that's now been done by many other different companies, both in the UK and increasingly around the world.
We've now extended that approach to not just companies but also charities and third-sector organizations. So, what if there was a trustee on the board of a charity directly representing nature in its decision-making? How would that be different?
In England, we have things called Catchment Partnerships, where all different bodies involved in looking after the rivers come together to talk. It's only a voluntary body, but in my catchment for the Roding, I said, “Wait a second, we've got everyone in the room here: the environment agencies, the water companies, the farmers, the councils, the charities—all these people. Who's representing the river here? No one's actually speaking for the river. What does the river want in all of this?
And so, we've just agreed to appoint a Voice of the River on the Catchment Partnership—the first time that will happen in England. And this is just snowballing now. The more you think of it, the more places you can think, why shouldn't nature be represented in this process here?
Other things we're doing include things like fundamentally, to bring about the Rights of Nature, we will need to change the nature of ownership and the rights that an owner can have over nature. Because, actually, ownership as it currently stands is incompatible with the fundamental rights of nature to exist. But again, trying to force that change on unwilling owners is not going to happen in the near future.
So, we're starting voluntarily with owners that do want to do it. We're working with owners of land, rivers, and other parts of nature to figure out how they can give self-ownership to nature they currently own. Can nature own itself?
We've been working with a few different landowners, including the owner of the largest water body in the UK—Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland—to work out if it's possible for the lough to own itself. And I think in the next year or two, there will be, in the UK, the first parts of nature owning themselves.
Again, it's voluntary, but it shows the way forward and helps break apart the current paradigm of how property relates to nature. It allows people to imagine a world that could be different—because it's already happening. Even though it's voluntary, this river owns itself. It is possible. It can happen elsewhere.
To me, that's really exciting. That’s the absolute core of what Lawyers for Nature does: trying to radically reimagine how our legal, political, and economic systems could relate to nature, and then, in whatever way we can, making that a reality in the here and now.
You can learn more about Paul Powlesland and Lawyers for Nature here, and the River Roding Trust here.
The River Roding is a tributary of the River Thames, flowing through Essex and East London. Once heavily polluted, it has been the focus of restoration efforts led by local groups, including the River Roding Trust, which works to revive its ecological health and protect it as a vital urban waterway.
SLAPP Lawsuits (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) are legal actions designed to intimidate, silence, or burden individuals or organizations engaged in public advocacy, criticism, or activism. Often filed by corporations, government entities, or powerful individuals, these lawsuits are not necessarily intended to succeed in court but rather to exhaust the defendant’s resources and discourage dissent. In response, many jurisdictions have enacted anti-SLAPP laws to prevent legal intimidation and allow for the early dismissal of baseless claims.
British common law traditions were shaped by William Blackstone, whose 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) became a foundational legal text, influencing courts in the UK, the USA, and beyond.
Great story