Will You Take Ice with That? A Plain Account of the 'Rights of Nature' Push for Sea Ice

Wesley J. Smith outlines a growing movement called Rights of Nature (RoN) that seeks to grant legal rights or personhood to nonhuman parts of the environment. RoN has already produced legal outcomes in multiple places: courts and local governments have recognized rights for rivers, glaciers, lakes, trees, and other natural features. Smith cites examples including a mountain in New Zealand, wave rights in a Spanish bay, and actions that blocked copper mining in Panama on the basis of the earth's rights.

The new development: sea ice as a rights-bearing entity

An academic paper titled "Toward Rights of Sea Ice" advances the argument that Arctic sea ice should be treated as a subject of law. The paper frames sea ice as part of the "more-than-human" realm—defined in the article as entities beyond human beings, including animals, plants, ecosystems, and inanimate planetary features such as water, land, sea ice, and air.

Smith responds sharply. He rejects the idea that ice has agency. He frames frozen water and the mineral content of water as inanimate things without the kind of interests or agency that humanlike legal rights presuppose. He sees the "more-than-human" label as implying additional moral or ontological status beyond being simply "other than human," a change he interprets as misanthropic and rooted in a form of earth-centered veneration.

Practical implications Smith raises

• Resource management and infrastructure. If rivers or ice hold rights such as "the right to flow," longstanding practices like flood control, hydroelectric projects, or mining could face new legal obstacles.

• Legal complexity. Granting personhood to inanimate features introduces novel questions about standing, representation, enforcement, and how to balance competing human and nonhuman claims.

• International governance. The push to fold RoN into international Arctic law could clash with state-centric governance and existing treaty frameworks that allocate rights and responsibilities among states.

What the sea-ice proposal says (in the paper's terms)

The academic paper promotes an ethical reframing that emphasizes relationship, interdependence, and well-being of "all entities." It suggests that RoN can provide a conceptual and normative basis for changing legal approaches to the Arctic, including potentially recognizing sea ice's ontological importance and legal personality.

The debate is active and consequential: proponents seek to reshape legal frameworks to include nonhuman entities, while critics warn that doing so conflates metaphysical or ethical claims with practical law and policy. The discussion matters for climate adaptation, resource use in polar regions, and how courts and governments weigh human activities against emerging legal claims by or for nature.