The jungle is dead, there are souls that, and they are the true rulers of the forest.
The goal of a fairly new constitutional field that is gaining traction is to grant rights to inanimate objects like natural formations.
New York University School of Law, which spearheaded the development of this novel legal theory, is one of the leading law schools. It was the law school’s Earth Rights Research and Action Clinic‘s ( Earth Rights Research and Action ) Initiative in 2022 when it launched the More Than Human Life Project, or MOTH.
The job “is an integrative program advancing freedom and well-being for mankind, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all”, according to its site.
In addition to NYU Law, for instance, Harvard University will provide a course this fall titled” Rights of Nature” that” will observe this fast-growing field, assessing the origins, practice, and ability of granting legitimate personhood to normal objects”.
However, some critics have voiced their concerns about the subject, who claim that it cheapens human rights because it works bestow rights on potentially everything. It could also thwart economic development.
Wesley Smith, a well-known Christian bioethicist, stated in an email interview that” for nature to have rights, it must also be capable of assuming concomitant duties or responsibilities toward others.”
” Beyond that, granting rights to nature means that everything is potentially a rights-bearer. Nothing really has rights if everything has them. At best, nature rights would devalue the idea in much the same way that wild inflation would destroy currency value.
More Than Human Life’s founding director, César Rodriguez-Garavito, who chairs the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU Law, stated that MOTH was inspired by a 2021 decision by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, the nation’s highest court, holding that mining operations in the Los Cedros forest had violated the rights of Pacha Mama, or “mother nature”.
A song by British musician Cosmo Sheldrake that features sounds of birds, animals, and wind noises recorded at Los Cedros should be copyrighted as a joint creation of human and non-human entities, according to MOTH attorneys currently arguing before an Ecuadorian judge.
Rodrigues-Garavito “intends to establish a legal precedent by establishing the Los Cedros cloud forest’s creative rights, which have already been recognized as an entity with legal personhood and rights under a landmark 2021 judgment by the Ecuadorian constitutional court,” the Guardian reported in January.
” The forest is alive, there are spirits in the forest, they are the real rulers of the forest”, Rodriguez-Garavito quotes one indigenous leader in his book” More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing”.
He draws the conclusion that if” the forest is alive… then we need to find ways to hear their voices and spirits.” The more fundamental idea that everything is alive and that all beings speak in their own ways has been translated into Western law as MOTH, according to the translator.
Rodriguez-Garavito previously attributed the “proliferation of populist governments and movements ] to the violation of human rights around the world” to the election of President Donald Trump.
He wrote in 2023 on Open Global Rights, a website he edits, that a “populist worldview that is distrustful of the’ cosmopolitan elites ‘ (scientists, technocrats, transnational activists, and members of the mainstream media ) advancing the climate action agenda” is part of an “authoritarian anti-environmental script”.
Rodriguez-Garavito did not respond to an email from The College Fix seeking comment.
Smith argued in a letter to the editor of the National Review on July 10 that the push to grant non-living things rights is not scientific. It is neo-pagan mysticism”. He cites a passage from Rodriguez-Garavito’s book that states there are spirits in the forest.
Smith’s views echoes that of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who noted that claims of new “rights” have exploded.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2019, Pompeo wrote, “[T]he blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by the government.
The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights ‘ former director, Aaron Rhodes, also expressed concern that the promotion of environmental rights in the face of climate change could serve as a justification and launch pad for campaigns to end capitalism and advance revolutionary economic ideologies that threaten property rights and individual freedom.
In a conservative Heritage Foundation policy paper for 2020, Rhodes made the remarks.
Rhodes ‘ observations match a chapter of Rodriguez-Garavito’s book, available for free on MOTH’s website, titled” Recasting Interspecies Care and Solidarity as Emergent Anti-Capitalist Politics”.
The biography of one of the authors, Anna Sturman, reads that “her work brings together the two colonial-capitalist frameworks she knows best, Aotearoa]the Māori language name for New Zealand ] and Australia, in conversation with critical perspectives from across the world”.
According to Sturman, non-human rights” will be about changing the flows of resources and power and creating solidarity… and justice in capitalist ruin.”
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