Mount Taranaki in New Zealand Is Legally Declared a Person

Mar. 15, 2025

Mount Taranaki.Photo:Lu Huaiqian/Xinhua via Getty

Lu Huaiqian/Xinhua via Getty

Mount Taranaki is officially a person.

Mount Taranaki.Getty

Getty

The move to change its ownership and personhood status under the Jan. 30 Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill comes in response to a history of land confiscations and transgressions against the Māori.

“Today, Taranaki, our maunga [mountain], our maunga tupuna [ancestral mountain], is released from the shackles — the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate,” said Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, co-leader of political party Te Pāti Māori.

Hundreds of Māori gathered outside New Zealand’s parliament to celebrate the Taranaki Maunga Collective Redress Bill being signed into law.

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Natural entities have been gaining rights in recent years, especially in New Zealand when it became the first country to enact such a law in 2014. The country recognized Te Urewea sacred forest as a legal person, granting its guardianship to the Tūhoe tribe, and in 2017, the Whanganui river followed suit as the local iwi (tribe) assumed responsibility for it.

Mount Taranaki.Lu Huaiqian/Xinhua via Getty

Other countries gave natural elements rights in efforts to fight climate change. Orange County, Florida, in the United States voted in the 2020 election to adopt a Rights of Nature law, becoming the largest municipality in the U.S. to do so. The law largely applies to bodies of water.

“Our waters also have new legal rights: to exist, flow, be protected against pollution, and to maintain healthy ecosystems. This vote heralds a new day in Florida in which our waterways are accorded the highest protections available under law,” said Chuck O’Neal, the chairman of the Florida Rights of Nature Network.

source: people.com