Much has been said about the rights of nature. The purpose of our blog post is not to review the various positions for and against the rights of nature. Rather, it aims to show how a conference held at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI) in Halle, Germany, in January 2024, helped to understand what a recently published article in the Journal of Law and Society, ‘Shortcuts and Detours of Environmental Collective Legal Mobilizations: The Cases of the Atrato River and the Amazon Region in Colombia’ (Vol 51, Issue 1, 2024) could not cover. The rich discussions at the conference shed light on how to demonstrate the importance of nature, socio-ecological relations, and ecological justice to courts, even when scientific expertise seems limited in demonstrating this holistically. How can we get judges to deal with the problems and consequences of the global socioecological devastation that is already happening?