‘The forest is alive, there are spirits in the forest, they are the real rulers of the forest’
A relatively new legal field gaining traction aims to establish rights for natural formations and other inanimate objects.
One of the law schools leading the charge for this novel legal theory is New York University School of Law, which in 2022 launched the More Than Human Life Project, or MOTH, an initiative of the law school’s Earth Rights Research and Action Clinic.
The project “is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all,” according to its website.
In addition to NYU Law, for example, Harvard University will offer a course this fall titled “Rights of Nature” that “will examine this fast-growing field, assessing the origins, practice, and potential of granting legal personhood to natural objects.”
But the topic has raised concerns among some critics who contend that it cheapens human rights because it works to bestow rights on potentially everything. It could also thwart economic development.
“For nature to possess rights, it must also be capable of assuming concomitant duties or responsibilities toward others, a farcical notion,” well-known Christian bioethicist Wesley Smith told The College Fix in an email interview.
“Beyond that, granting rights to nature means that everything is potentially a rights-bearer. If everything has rights, one could say that nothing really does. At best, nature rights would devalue the concept in much the same way that wild inflation destroys the worth of currency.”
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.”
MOTH attorneys currently seek to argue before an Ecuadorian judge that 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.
Rodríguez-Garavito “intends to set a legal precedent by establishing the creative rights of the Los Cedros cloud forest in northern Ecuador, which has already been recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood and rights under a landmark 2021 judgment by the constitutional court of Ecuador,” 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 concludes that if “the forest is alive . . . then we need to find ways to hear their voices and spirits.” MOTH is “the Western legal translation of the more fundamental notion that everything is alive, that all beings speak in their own ways.”
Rodriguez-Garavito has previously identified the election of President Donald Trump with a “proliferation of populist governments and movements [that] creates serious risks and challenges for human rights around the world.”
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.
Writing for National Review on July 10, Smith argued the effort to give rights to non-living things “isn’t science. 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.
“[T]hey blur the distinction between unalienable rights and ad hoc rights granted by the government,” Pompeo wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2019.
Activist Aaron Rhodes, former director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, also expressed concerns “that promotion of environmental rights in the face of climate change can be a justification and smoke screen for campaigns to end capitalism and to promote revolutionary economic ideologies that threaten property rights and individual freedom.”
Rhodes made the comments in a 2020 policy paper for the conservative Heritage Foundation.
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.”
Sturman writes that the goal of non-human rights “will be to transform the flows of resources and power and to build forms of solidarity . . . and justice in capitalist ruins.”
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