Thomas Linzey serves as senior legal counsel for the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER), a nonprofit organization committed to globally advancing environmental rights. He is widely recognized as the founder of the contemporary “community rights” and “rights of nature” movements, which have resulted in the adoption of several hundred municipal laws across the United States. In 2008, he assisted the Ecuadorian constitutional assembly to draft rights of nature provisions for the new Ecuadorian constitution, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Forbes, and the Nation magazine. In 2018, Linzey was named as one of the top 400 environmentalists of the last 200 years.