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What does a 150-year-old plane tree in Southend-on-Sea have in common with the Salween River, which flows through China, Myanmar and Thailand? In both cases, local communities are fighting to protect a living entity. In A Barrister for the Earth, Monica Feria-Tinta, a British-Peruvian barrister practising in public international law and international arbitration, proposes that both the tree and the river should be recognised in law as having the right to exist for their conservation. “Society has granted rights to abstract entities, such as corporations and now even to software,” she writes. So why shouldn’t plants, animals and ecosystems have them too?
In her debut, Feria-Tinta draws on ten of her own cases to show how, in recent years, the law has been used to combat environmental collapse, and why that should give us hope. Several of these cases have led to landmark rulings. In 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee found that Australia had failed to adequately protect Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders from the harmful impacts of climate change, determining that this inaction violated their right to enjoy their culture. It was the first international decision to hold a state responsible for climate inaction. Feria-Tinta’s work on the Los Cedros cloud forest helped protect it in 2021, when Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled in favour of protecting it against mining for gold and other minerals, setting a crucial legal precedent for the Rights of Nature movement. With each chapter, the author illustrates how the legal system can safeguard fragile ecosystems and hold governments and corporations to account.
The strengths of this book lie in Feria-Tinta’s vivid storytelling about the many ways in which different cultures understand and relate to the landscapes around them. She introduces readers to the Indigenous communities of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada, for whom all knowledge and history are encoded in rocks and stones, and the Earth is conceived as a single, interconnected living organism. In Mexico’s Sierra Madre Oriental, the Masewal people see the mountains as remnants of pillars that once bound the sky and the ground together. “The destruction of the pillars implied the partial fracture of a combined world and the appearance of two incomplete but interdependent worlds, in which ethereal spirits and humans continue to interact with each other,” she explains.
At times, the book’s persuasive force is undercut by its technical detail. Rather than clearly laying out how particular cases establish precedent or why they mark turning points in climate litigation, the narrative can become mired in legal terminology, risking alienating readers not already familiar with domestic and international justice systems. More broadly, the argument that law can meaningfully help steer us out of the climate crisis also feels somewhat underdeveloped, especially as the global rules-based order is collapsing before our very eyes.
Surely the book’s central question is whether legal systems can truly safeguard our shared future, so it would have been worthwhile to examine the limits of that claim more closely. Given the subtitle of the book, Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future, there is surprisingly little interrogation of that hopeful premise. The argument largely proceeds on the assumption that the application of laws around the world will rise to the challenge of the climate crisis, rather than probing the conditions under which this might fail. Aren’t international justice mechanisms only as strong as the collective faith placed in them? Doesn’t their effectiveness depend on the state of global democracy?
That said, A Barrister for the Earth is a worthwhile read, particularly for those seeking to learn about landmark climate litigation cases. Feria-Tinta’s inspiring career creates a fascinating entry point into this complex and rapidly evolving field.
A Barrister for the Earth: Ten Cases of Hope for Our Future by Monica Feria-Tinta. Faber & Faber, 2025. ISBN: 9780571386369
