Who speaks for extraterrestrial ecosystems?: Why ET should have standing

Christopher Stone's pioneering 1972 paper “Should Trees Have Standing?” proposed legal rights and standing for the environment under a guardianship model. In the decades since, the growing Rights of Nature movement has demonstrated the prescience of Stone's ideas. As humanity ventures into a new era of growing astrobiological research, and with increasing interest in commercial space development, the time is right to reimagine legal frameworks to acknowledge and safeguard the rights of extraterrestrial ecosystems. Building on Stone's argument, we propose that the legal system should recognise the interests of extraterrestrial life and its environments in line with his guardianship model. Several ways in which current law can be made to accommodate such recognition are suggested, for example through existing doctrines of international environmental law, including the ecosystems approach used in the Convention on Biodiversity. We examine the efficacy of the Rights of Nature movement and its role in promoting legal guardianship models to protect nature's interests, and call for engagement of environmental groups with key space governance bodies such as the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) or the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). We conclude that shifting the focus of current law and governance from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective will allow non-human interests to gain voice in decision making, expanding Stone's circle of rights beyond Earth.