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CIIS alum Missy Lahren is fighting to give forests, rivers, and living ecosystems a formal voice in the legal system.
Missy Lahren has spent more than three decades arguing on behalf of clients who cannot speak for themselves in court — forests, rivers, and living ecosystems that hold no standing under most conventional laws. As a director and lawyer at Earth Law Center, she has made it her life's work to change that. NBC Bay Area's "Climate in Crisis" series recently featured Lahren, tracing her legal victories across the U.S. and beyond.
The legal framework at the center of Lahren's work, Rights of Nature, grants ecosystems legal personhood or constitutional rights, which gives them a formal voice in the judicial system. Ecuador became the first country to enshrine this principle in its constitution in 2008; Bolivia, Panama, and others have since followed with new national laws. For Lahren, this represents the logical next step in rights-based legal systems: moving from regulating how humans use nature to recognizing that nature itself holds inherent rights.
A recent campaign is the Earth Law Center’s successful fight on behalf of the Elwha River in Washington State, where the federal government rewilded the entire river by removing two century-old dams, yet the state had to be forced to protect the adjacent forests in the surrounding watershed. The state's reversal came, fortuitously, on the final day of filming a documentary Lahren urgently commissioned to expose unjust regulators and raise public awareness. The Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness (PCC) program lent a hand by critiquing the first draft of the film, while CIIS community members Karie Crisp (PCC ’27) and Mary Evelyn Tucker assisted as Executive Producers.
Watch the documentary that helped raise awareness for this campaign:
Lahren earned two degrees from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program: an M.A. in 2014, and a Ph.D. in 2021. Her doctoral dissertation proposed a 5th through 8th grade curriculum to supplement California’s mandatory K-12 environmental literacy curriculum. Lahren’s version wove together the latest intelligence studies in the five kingdoms of life, the PCC curriculum, and legal activism — all in service to the world.
Her dissertation in philosophy benefited from prior studies, including her J.D. in 1991 and M.Ed. in Integral Education, completed the same year as her doctorate. That commitment to interdisciplinary study also gives her current legal work a longer and more compelling arc. The Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program's engagement with cosmology and consciousness offered a way of thinking about Earth jurisprudence not just as policy reform but as a reorientation of humanity's relationship with the living world — a thread that runs through her work to this day.
Lahren has served on the Board of Earth Law Center U.S. since 2020. In March 2026, she helped launch Earth Law Center U.K. as a founding Trustee and now works primarily out of the London office, continuing her efforts to protect legacy forests and river ecosystems across borders.
"There are so many reasons to fight for a forest," she told NBC Bay Area. "There's protecting biodiversity, there's carbon drawdown, but it's also for their intrinsic value to be." The conviction that living systems matter not only for what they give us but for what they are is the philosophical heart of Earth jurisprudence, and a potent expression of what a CIIS education can accomplish in the world.
Read the full story at NBC Bay Area.
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