Should a lake get legal rights like a person?

The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person?

Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, New York, has the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”

The peculiar ballot question comes amid a string of environmental calamities at the lake — poisonous algal blooms in summer, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish. But this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.

The proposed Lake Erie Bill of Rights is part of a growing number of efforts to carve out legal status for elements of nature, including rivers, forests, mountains and even wild rice. The efforts, which began decades ago but have gathered momentum in recent years, seek to show that existing laws are insufficient to protect nature against environmental harm. Under current law, lakes and deserts do not have legal standing, so people cannot sue on their behalf.

In Toledo, residents and elected officials say they believe the initiative has a good chance of being approved, but there is a catch: The measure’s own backers acknowledge that it is likely to be challenged in court as having little or no legal footing, and that it could ultimately be invalidated as reaching beyond the scope of city law.

The initiative’s main opponents are the owners of area farms, where much of the agricultural runoff that feeds the lake’s toxic algae originates. Farmers say that if the measure passes thousands of small farms could be sued for damages for polluting the lake and driven out of business.

Thomas Linzey, executive director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit group based in Pennsylvania that helped write the measure, said existing environmental laws were inadequate.

The intent of the initiative, Linzey said, is twofold — to send a warning that the community is fed up with a lack of state and federal action to protect Lake Erie, and to force the courts to recognize that ecosystems like the lake “possess independent rights to survive and be healthy.”

In other words, that rivers have a right to flow, forests have a right to thrive and lakes have a right to be clean.

Even if that concept never becomes the law of the land, the group says that its efforts are meant to make it clear that places like Toledo will oppose what they see as environmental degradation, sending an unsubtle message that certain companies might want to look elsewhere to do business.

The broader idea, environmentalists say, is a rethinking of nature and an individual’s place in it.

“There’s no precedent for any of this,” Linzey said. “It is almost a new consciousness — that a community is not just Homo sapiens.”

As the Feb. 26 Election Day approaches, some Toledo residents say their dependence on Lake Erie has made the question of the lake’s rights more than theoretical.

In 2014, the city went without drinking water for three days when the lake became so fouled by phosphorus runoff from upstream farms that household water was fit only for flushing toilets.

Stores closed. Hospitals accepted only the most seriously ill patients. Restaurants were empty. And some 500,000 people depended on bottled water in the middle of a brutally hot August.