Over the past two decades, rights of nature (RoN) philosophies and cases have grown in prominence in the United States and across the world as communities seek effective approaches for protecting communities from encroaching environmental crises. RoN principles—recognizing ecosystems as having rights and inherent value—have been invoked in diverse settings in over 150 cases in the United States, but studies on how the concept manifests at the local level are limited. The political and demographic diversity of communities engaging with RoN raises questions around prevalent notions associating environmental issues with liberal progressive politics and particular socio-economic classes and cultural backgrounds. To understand how this concept is able to span political and cultural divides and how it’s utilized and interpreted in these different settings, I conducted an interpretive analysis of embedded cases. The RoN movement is commonly characterized as a legal revolution to reorder dominant anthropocentric legal political and governance systems. Academics and activists often describe the goals of RoN to include catalyzing cultural awareness around human-environment interdependency and awakening western society to ecosystems’ rights to exist. This study reveals that in practice, communities’ understandings and applications of RoN laws do not necessarily match these definitions; rather, they comprise distinct elements which arise from communities’ particular cultural and historical contexts. Through semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, this study examines how three geographically and demographically distinct U.S. communities—Grant Township, PA; Santa Monica, CA; and Orange County, FL—are interpreting and operationalizing RoN. Exploring how the communities’ engagement with RoN relates to their geographical contexts contributes to knowledge surrounding how politically, ideologically, and demographically distinct communities articulate and ascribe meaning to protecting their local ecosystems. At a time when corporate interests often benefit at the expense of environmental and community health and state powers are eroding local autonomy, community RoN efforts have had some success. Considering the communities’ RoN narratives through theoretical frameworks such as Michele de Certeau’s (1984) art of the weak and Chloe Ahmann’s (2018) temporal maneuvering against slow violence reveals how RoN laws can serve as a resistance tactic, one that is adaptable to varying political, demographic, and cultural contexts.