In Ecuador, Indigenous groups' use of 'legal rights' to save protected forest is inspiring others

Jose Martín Ovando suddenly halts in his tracks and crouches down along the steep forest path shrouded in mist. He pulls out a magnifying glass from his small backpack to inspect a clump of deep green moss.

Among the greenery, he has spotted an orchid: Dracula morleyi. Blotted in black with a flash of white at the center, it’s barely bigger than a fingernail. “This place is full of so much biodiversity,” he grins. “Scientists don’t even know about most of it.”

Ovando is a guide at Los Cedros Protective Forest, a in the northwest Ecuadorian Andes, one of the world’s most biodiverse areas.

This tropical haven – home to a , including the critically endangered black-and-chestnut eagle and brown-headed spider monkey, jaguars, endemic frogs, more than 300 species of birds, 600 kinds of moths, and 200 varieties of orchids – is at the forefront of a global movement to recognise the legal rights of the natural world.

The movement is rooted in the common Indigenous belief that nature – from the Andean mountains to Amazonian rivers to a single soldier ant – is a system to which human beings belong and with which they must harmoniously coexist. The legal theory argues that these ecosystems and species...