The Rights of Nature movement has recently achieved significant successes in using legal personhood as a tool for environmental protection. Perhaps most famously, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was accorded legal personhood in 2017. These kinds of development have attracted plenty of scholarly interest, but few have scrutinized a foundational underlying question: Can natural areas, such as rivers, or other non-sentient natural entities actually be legal persons?The case of the Whanganui River is an example of the direct legal personhood model: it purports to grant legal rights to the river directly. Some other jurisdictions have set up legal persons to administer rivers, without declaring the rivers themselves to be legal persons: the indirect legal personhood model. This article offers legal-philosophical arguments for why legal personhood cannot be attributed to rivers directly.Normally, legal persons can hold claim-rights and be legally wronged. Some legal persons, such as human adults, can also be held legally responsible and exercise legal competences by entering into contracts. Natural entities cannot do any of these things. Hence, they cannot be legal persons directly; rather, their putative direct legal personhood will collapse into indirect legal personhood. Hence, treating natural entities as direct legal persons amounts only to a legal fiction. Such fictions may be justified for symbolic reasons. However, if environmental protection requires setting up a legal person to protect a natural entity, such protection in most cases can be realized without claiming that the natural entity itself would have become a legal person.

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大自然能拥有权利吗？这并不像你想象的那么容易

自然权利运动最近在利用法人资格作为环境保护的工具方面取得了重大成功。也许最著名的是，新西兰奥特亚罗瓦的旺格努伊河于 2017 年获得法人资格。此类开发吸引了大量学术兴趣，但很少有人仔细研究一个基本的潜在问题：自然区域，如河流，或其他非有意识的自然实体实际上是法人吗？旺格努伊河的案例是直接法人模式的一个例子：它旨在直接授予河流合法权利。另一些法域设立法人管理河流，但不宣布河流本身为法人：间接法人模式。本文就法人资格为何不能直接归因于河流提供了法哲学论证。通常情况下，法人可以享有请求权并在法律上受到冤屈。一些法人，例如人类成年人，也可以通过订立合同来承担法律责任并行使法律能力。自然实体不能做任何这些事情。因此，他们不能直接成为法人；相反，他们假定的直接法人身份将崩溃为间接法人身份。因此，将自然实体视为直接法人只是一种法律虚构。出于象征性的原因，此类虚构可能是合理的。但是，如果环境保护需要设立一个法人来保护一个自然实体，