Listen 🎧
You can also listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast apps.
Watch 📺
In many parts of the world, the law treats a company as a person — it can own property, sign contracts, and go to court. A river can't do any of those things. This week's guest has spent years trying to change that.
Brontie Ansell is a corporate solicitor and the Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature, a UK-based group who take on no human clients at all, because they treat nature itself as their client. We talk about what it means to give the natural world a voice — in the courts, in government policy, and even inside a company boardroom, where Brontie has served as a Nature Director.
When it works, Brontie says, nothing dramatic happens in the boardroom — no showdown across the table — just patient conversation, over months.
This episode is also a little different. It opens with the more personal part of the conversation I normally keep for paying members. It was too foundational to hold back, so this week it's open to everyone.
Want to know more about the people being interviewed?
Learn about their personal journeys in their own words by becoming a paid member
About the guest
Brontie Ansell is a corporate solicitor and the Managing Director of Lawyers for Nature.
Links mentioned in this episode
- Lawyers for Nature
- The We Are Nature campaign
- Nature on the Board: the open-source Faith in Nature guide
- Maidstone Borough Council's rights of nature framework (Kent, England)
- House of Hackney
- ASRA
Chapters
- 00:00 — Sneak Peak
- 00:32 — Introduction
- 03:08 — Meet Brontie Ansell
- 03:28 — Why company law? The white space nobody's using
- 06:48 — Do corporations have more rights than nature?
- 10:44 — Why nature needs a voice in court: the guardian model
- 12:56 — How Lawyers for Nature began
- 16:57 — Are we waking up to being part of nature?
- 18:15 — When a movement goes mainstream: the risk of greenwashing
- 23:42 — Rewriting the dictionary: the We Are Nature campaign
- 24:13 — Bottom-up or top-down? Nature on the board
- 27:42 — When legislation works: the River Standing Bill
- 29:25 — Maidstone: a council adopts a rights of nature framework
- 30:39 — Open-sourcing the work, and refusing to gatekeep
- 34:09 — Inside the boardroom: what a Nature Director actually does
- 38:06 — From less harm to nature positivity
- 41:31 — What they're experimenting with next: Risks Beyond Human Eyes
- 45:21 — The rabbit in the garden: Ecological Attribution Rights
- 51:01 — One thing to take away: there's always an answer
- 51:54 — Outro