Challenging Corporate “Personhood”: Energy Companies and the “Rights” of Non‐Humans

Since the early 2000s, the idea of “rights” for nature has gained increasing traction among environmental activists throughout the Americas. Drawing on a series of recent legal cases in the state of Pennsylvania, this article tracks the efforts of a U.S.‐based nongovernmental organization to use such rights in ongoing struggles against energy companies involved in natural gas extraction. The central argument is that, despite their considerable philosophical and practical difficulties, the rights of nature are being productively used as part of a grassroots movement of civil disobedience that aims to simultaneously challenge corporate personhood and reestablish the power of local communities to defend the rights of ecosystems within their jurisdictions. By explicitly juxtaposing the “rights” of nature with the “rights” of corporate persons, local communities facing the impacts of natural gas extraction are attempting not only to make substantive claims about the legal defensibility of nonhuman rights but also, just as importantly, to set precedents for the revocation of corporate personhood. Close attention to these arguments suggests ways of bringing together recent work on corporate personhood with theoretical insights drawn from political ontology.