Abstract
Rights of Nature, the idea of extending legal personhood to nature, is today’s most prominent alternative to mainstream environmental governance. Proponents describe Rights of Nature as a grassroots movement of diverse actors opposing commodification of life and anthropocentric dualism of western thought. In Rights of Nature, indigenous cosmologies validate holistic models of life to overcome dualities of nature and humans. We argue this move enacts a paradoxical dichotomy between the West and the rest and, in so doing, treats rights as existing outside western history. In this article, we push against the image of Rights of Nature as a global consensus converging on the inevitability of rights. Applying decolonial, black feminist perspectives on historical mobilizations of rights, we ask how rights for nature becomes rights as natural. We trace individuals, institutions, and ideas associated with Rights of Nature, conceptualized as a Transnational Policy Network. We find tight linkages among a small number of actors, mostly from the global North, who draw on western holism and jurisprudence to present nature’s rights as an indigenous and natural alternative to western development. Rights of Nature is not just connected to the same ideas of nature and law it rejects, but through these connections Rights of Nature universalizes colonial modes of existence as natural.
Introduction
Rights of Nature (RoN) is a form of environmentalism that demands legal recognition of the integral interdependency of all life. Proponents seek to extend personhood to hitherto excluded dimensions of nonhuman nature including environmental support systems that make possible life itself. Rejecting now-dominant neoliberal market environmentalism of sustainable development and the green economy, RoN is emerging as not just “alternative development” but an “alternative to development” (Escobar, 1992; Gudynas, 2011). Calls for RoN have proliferated in global discourse, especially at counterconferences to climate change talks. Policies implementing legal personhood for nature are percolating across the world, perhaps most famously in Ecuador and Bolivia, where RoN is most associated with indigenous politics and anti-imperialist platforms (Escobar, 2010, 2011; Gudynas, 2011; Latta, 2013; Radcliffe, 2012; Walsh, 2010). There also exist laws in New Zealand, India, and the US, and others are in deliberation in Nepal and the EU. It seems that people across the globe are converging on the idea of RoN as a solution to problems of environment and development.
But RoN is more than a prominent rejection of recent environment-development paradigms. Proponents see RoN as a fundamental alternative to “existing systems of governance” (Cullinan, 2011: 7), “the anthropocentrism of modernity” (Escobar, 2011: 138), “western culture” (Gudynas, 2011: 442), and “the capitalist system” (UDRME, 2010). Even as the emergence of RoN has involved multiple actors, proponents posit RoN as a natural inevitably whose time has come, marking the demise of modernity. In Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, author Cormac Cullinan (2011: 51) writes it is the “delusory” construction of a “‘human world’ that is separate from the real universe” that has produced the “myths of human supremacy” which “is now more real to us than Earth.” Furthermore, he contrasts this delusion to “indigenous peoples” who on one hand “still prioritize maintaining a mutually enhancing relationship with their habitat” and at the same time “have had virtually no influences at all on the governance systems of the dominant cultures” (Cullinan, 2011: 68). In RoN, the problem is the unnatural, dualist rift; the solution is legal personhood for nature, a solution that is itself natural because it is both holistic and indigenous.
The question animating this paper is not why or how various indigenous communities adopt a rights-based framework (Andolina et al., 2009; Rojas, 2013; Sieder and Vivero, 2017; Valladares and Boelens, 2017). Rather, it is about how rights for nature becomes rights as natural. We argue, first, that RoN recapitulates the precise logic of dualism it seeks to undo. In the name of a nondualist biocentric alternative to the anthropocentric dualism of modernity and western modes of being and living, RoN enacts an elemental division between inside and outside, the west and the rest. In this paper, we extend RoN’s challenge to duality by illustrating its largely unacknowledged imbrication with the supposed “West” it rejects. To do so, we treat RoN as a “transnational policy network” (De Francisco and Boelens, 2015; Haas, 1992; Hervé, 2014; Wang and Hosoki, 2016) and trace connections among individuals, ideas, and institutions advocating RoN. In so doing, we show that RoN emerges from an extensive and diverse range of socioenvironmental critiques of western development that together resist any bifurcation of being inside or outside western thought. This is important because when RoN is positioned as outside “the west,” it appears as though there is a convergence on the idea of “rights”—and it is this seeming convergence that naturalizes the western history RoN seeks to counter. Thus, to situate the emergence of RoN, we elucidate this extensive yet often unacknowledged network of actors and ideas. We pay special attention to connections that have simultaneously forged RoN as a dominant alternative and made RoN appear as a natural truth on which separate actors are converging.
Second, we argue that by treating rights for nature as a natural truth, RoN is not only contradictory but naturalizes the colonial history of legal personhood. To clarify, RoN enacts a contradictory logic, where in the name of overcoming western human–nature dualism, and its concomitant anthropocentrism, it turns to western notions of rights, personhood, and holism as the solution. In so doing, nature becomes something identifiably “natural” by becoming more like colonial conceptions of the human, whose existence can only be legitimized by legal personhood. We suggest that tracing the mobilization of RoN through networks that imbricate western legal and environmental actors helps understand how the language of juridical recognition for nonhuman life appears as a natural global convergence rather than a political strategy mobilized by a dispersion of sociopolitically and geohistorically different movements. That is, we denaturalize both rights for nature and RoN as a transnational policy network (TPN) by giving them history: in the ongoing relation between western environmentalism and holistic models of life, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, between legal personhood and colonial modes of existence. In turn, we reconceptualize rights as something movements such as RoN draw on strategically (as with human rights or indigenous rights) rather than a natural and political truth.
The next section develops our analytical approach by drawing on existing literature on RoN, TPNs as epistemic communities, and decolonial critiques of rights and personhood. We posit TPNs as both an object to be analyzed and as a method. The following section demonstrates the people, places, and ideas that constitute RoN as a hybrid TPN. We start by introducing and tracing connections among the lawyers and environmentalists who are key participants shaping the TPN. We then examine how these actors mobilize a long history of ideas about juridical rights in western environmentalism, particularly in relation to holistic notions of life. It is precisely through these actors pulling on such long colonial histories of western universalism that RoN appears outside of modernity and outside the active work of an epistemic community. By attending to the largely unacknowledged imbrication of RoN with the west, this section also addresses the key role ideas of indigeneity play in justifying rights as natural. Our argument is that the rights-based approach and holistic models of life that constitute RoN are not just connected to the same western ideas of nature and law it rejects, but through these connections western thought and modes of existence are further universalized as natural.
Analytical approach
RoN, postneoliberalism, and indigeneity
The emergence of RoN, particularly in Latin America, has attracted scholarly attention, especially around questions of anti-imperialism (in response to western development and neoliberal austerity) and the growing traction of indigenous politics. Much attention goes to Ecuador and Bolivia, which recently recognized nature’s rights in their constitutions: in Ecuador on the basis of nature’s intrinsic value, and in Bolivia under the terms of human rights to quality of life and environmental protection (Gudynas, 2011). Critical scholarly questions hinge on how these events in Ecuador and Bolivia articulate with the broader debate about whether postneoliberalism offers the possibility of rupture with neoliberalism or is a differently dressed iteration of the same state–civil society relations and postcolonial governmentality (Bebbington and Bebbington, 2011; Ettlinger and Hartmann, 2015; Peck et al., 2010; Radcliffe, 2012).
On one hand, this literature treats RoN as an opening toward new postneoliberal configurations of attachment and belonging beyond the bounded, late liberal state and the individualized agency of the citizen. For example, following Walsh (2010), Latta (2013) frames these shifts in Ecuador and Bolivia in terms of a “political-epistemic insurgency” that offers “decolonial potential” for both “indigenous citizenship” and “natural resource policy” (p. 576). He argues that the rights of subjects are already under threat by the cross-border character of ecological crises, and that the resulting new forms of environmental governance in Ecuador not only reflect a “conjoined agentic participation between humans as well as non-human beings and things,” but furthermore cause “socio-spatial realignment of contemporary citizenship in Ecuador” (Latta, 2013: 569–570). Latta positions this realignment within the context of indigenous people’s responses to socioenvironmental justice via diverse political subjectivities and territorial attachments irreducible to Westphalian notions. Radcliffe (2012: 242) makes a similar argument. Although differently engaging the history of rights-based approaches, she sees these new constitutional practices as not merely a repetition of liberal concepts of rights, but rather as “differentiated citizenship” that make claims along lines of difference rather than universal sameness.
On the other hand, despite gesturing toward the possibility of RoN as articulating a mode of citizenship that challenges state–society relations, Radcliffe (2012) ultimately argues that, in practice, the rights-based constitutional “alternative” reproduces postcolonial conditions of development including centrality of the state, patterns of resource distribution, and social marginalization. Arsel (2012), too, uses Ecuador, and more specifically the Yasuní case of exchanging payments for ecosystem services in place of oil extraction, to argue that the new constitutional language not only fails to realize its aims but exacerbates the exact problem it offers to solve. Arsel shows that even as the Yasuní proposal foregrounds nonextraction, it depends on the state for revenue generation, commodifies carbon, and is part of a broader policy that differentiates particular spaces for protection in order to set aside others for intensified extraction of oil, gold, and more. Fitz-Henry (2012) also argues that despite more radical imaginaries of social movements, the way RoN has been taken up in Ecuador’s constitutional process, and has since been applied, functions as political cover for renewed commitments to large-scale mining and oil refining. Further, she poses her critique in terms of competing constitutional rights claims that override those of RoN, such as energy sovereignty and “strategic priorities,” yet she maintains the ideas animating rights for nature mark both a novel break from “colonial racism” and a continuity with “indigenous visions and histories” (Fitz-Henry, 2014: 134).
This raises another line of inquiry in existing scholarship, on the relationship between RoN, critiques of development, and indigeneity. On the one hand, many scholars situate RoN not only in indigenous political organizing but in indigenous cosmology. This is particularly so in Ecuador and Bolivia, through the Aymara and Quechua paired concepts of Pachamama (the earth subject/goddess) and Suma Qamaña/Sumak Kawsay (the broader notion of alternative(s) to capitalist development through communal well-being) (Arsel, 2012; Avelar, 2013; Gudynas, 2011). Scholars like Arsel (2012) and Gudynas (2011) problematize the colonial trappings of English translations of these concepts in terms of “rights,” “nature,” “mother earth”—yet we note that their caveat is a response to a substitutability already enacted. Similarly, Kauffman and Martin (2014) understand the emergence of national RoN practices in terms of the “ancient indigenous concept” of “buen vivir” and the emergence of international RoN practices as the “scaling up [of these] local norms… to the global level” (Kauffman and Martin, 2014: 41).
On the other hand, some scholars note the entanglement between western environmentalism and indigenous modalities of being, knowing, and governing. In contrast to Kauffman and Martin’s scaling up, for Arsel (2012) institutionalization of “nature’s rights” in Ecuador emerged through coalitions that depend just as much on environmentalists as on indigenous activists. Gudynas (2011) briefly points to the ways western environmental ethics (e.g. deep ecology) articulate with Buen Vivir through problematizations of human–nature dualisms and anthropocentrism. Lenferna (2012) identifies these entanglements in the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth. The lead author of the Declaration was South African lawyer Cormac Cullinan, a prominent campaigner for RoN. Lenferna argues that Cullinan draws the logical connections between nature’s existence, intrinsic worth, and rights from prolific American philosopher, theologian, and cultural historian Thomas Berry. Berry, in turn, evokes indigenous traditions as the source of cosmological invigoration necessary to resuscitate traditions of natural law ethics, from Aristotle to Aquinas. (We say more about Cullinan and Berry below.)
While less acknowledged, this complicated imbrication between indigenous genealogies of Pachamama/Buen Vivir and western genealogies of nature and law raises provocative questions around the way in/visibility of certain genealogies affects not only RoN but the nature of rights. Scholarship regarding efficacy of RoN with regard to postneoliberalism and decommodification investigates the possibilities and limitations of rights-based discourses but it largely fails to ask how rights becomes the language of legibility for challenging state–capital. Indeed, even as Fitz-Henry (2014) argues that “students of the neoliberalization of nature” should better attend to RoN as the forefront of movements against colonialism, she couples this with a call for “students of rights of nature” to attend to the limits and critiques of rights-based frameworks (p. 134). In so doing, she draws attention to how the focus on rights animates Latin American scholars critique of RoN as “romanticized essentialization of Andean thought” that obscures how the core dynamics of capitalism vacate “all beings” of their “livingness”—persons or property, humans or nature (Fitz-Henry, 2014: 137). This opens up important questions about whether rights in the context of RoN are really an outside alternative, and if they are not, how they come to appear not only as counterhegemonic but also as a natural convergence on an inevitable truth.
TPNs as epistemic communities
We address these questions by posing RoN as a TPN. TPNs are most notably defined by state, for-profit, and/or nonprofit actors coming together in ways that belie conventional ascriptions of public versus private, and are directed toward issues not specific to a single nation-state (Holmes, 2011). As noted above, existing literature on RoN already gestures toward the significance of connections among multiple actors as well as lineages of political thought, but this literature has investigated neither these connections nor their significance. While some literature draws a distinction between TPNs (De Francisco and Boelens, 2015) and Transnational Advocacy Networks (see Hervé, 2014; Keck and Sikkink, 1998), we find especially useful the emphasis across these literatures on knowledge and epistemic communities: the specific role of experts in the production, circulation, and reception of knowledge (De Francisco and Boelens, 2015; Haas, 1992; Hervé, 2014; Wang and Hosoki, 2016). Epistemic communities favor actors “with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain” (De Francisco and Boelens, 2015: 483; Haas, 1992: 3) who mobilize “standards, categories, measurement instruments, causal models, [and] logical relationships” that “organize objects and subjects in (newly shaped) realities and hierarchies” (De Francisco and Boelens, 2015: 484). Crucially, Goldman (2005) shows that consensus in epistemic communities is reached not through transcendental convergence on a new fact. Instead, consensus is the outcome of a repetition of practices, a self-referential process of recirculating particular productions of knowledge that then are accepted as facts in themselves.
Accordingly, we treat TPNs not only as the object of our investigation but as a fitting method to trace and follow the specific connections that constitute the episteme of RoN. This method makes evident the volume and reach of particular epistemic practices and the simultaneous elision of others. Crucial to the successful formation of epistemic communities is the value of truth claims, whereby the naturalization of consensus as facts depends on the opacity of particular epistemic practices. Following Goldman, we unpack this process of naturalizing epistemic effects through tracing the connections between the seeming invisibility of work done by a “jet-setting transnational class of networkers” (Goldman, 2005: 271, 226) in conferences, workshops, training programs, and so forth, and the dramatized visibility of scaled up local indigenous practices.
Our aim is to make visible the position and involvement of experts as well as the mobilization of a particular history of rights through the examination of statements, including their conditions of production, moments of emergence, and networks of circulation. That is, we take up the TPN as epistemic community as a method of generating data that hinges together people, places, and ideas. In turn, we situate our site of analysis through the imbrication, connection, and articulation of particular ideas of nature and personhood/legal standing. To clarify we are not examining the making of policy per se, but rather tracing the connections in epistemic practices that generate consensus around RoN. To do so, we focus on the expression of these ideas as material events in themselves, that is we treat texts as epistemic practices that cinch discourse to bodies and spaces. We developed an archive on RoN and traced a variety of links within and between statements, for example authorship of key texts, citations within texts, and sites of knowledge production (such as organizations) and circulation (such as workshops and conferences). The first author conducted the bulk of data collection and analysis.
Decolonial perspectives on the colonial episteme of rights and personhood
Our questions about and approach to analysis of RoN as an epistemic community are also grounded in decolonial thought on the episteme of rights and coloniality. Questions about the role of juridical recognition and rights in the formation of insides and outsides of colonialism have been at the center of debate for decades among postcolonial, indigenous, and black scholars. This scholarship has articulated intimate relations between rule of law and genocidal dispossession, slavery, colonial mandates, war on terror, and other imperial interventions; not only in terms of “defense of conquest and colonization” but also as “naturalized regime of rights and disabilities, power and disadvantage that flowed from it” (Harris, 1993: 1723). Following Fanon, Coulthard (2014: 31) argues that crucial for the duration and stability of colonial social relations is the ability to “transform the colonized population into subjects of imperial rule.” Indeed, the colonial dynamic between inside/outside undergirds both contemporary human rights discourses and those of colonial jurists who equated law-lacking territories with dehumanized populations whose humanity must be granted or given back. For Esmeir (2006) it is precisely this colonial constitution of modern law that makes operations of juridical order occur through both dehumanization (withholding of rights) and humanization (granting personhood status). Moreover, this constitutive possibility of revoking recognition doubles the status of the human: as universal mankind and as yet-to-be human. Esmeir (2006: 1544) calls the way law comes to constitute what is “human” a process of “juridicalization,” which generates what she calls “juridical humanity.” Crucially, the more “we think of humanity as a juridical status, the more dehumanization is possible” (Esmeir, 2006; 1549–1550).
Not only does “juridical humanity” make dehumanization possible but the relationship between redemptive powers of colonialism and humanization makes necessary the continual identification of dehumanized subjects (Esmeir, 2006: 1546–1547). Only through suffering, wounding, infliction, and victimhood can those not recognized by the status of personhood be incorporated into the “brotherhood of Man” and acquire associated rights (Weheliye, 2014: 75–76; see also Brown, 1995; Hartman, 1997). Scholars identify several problems with this basis of inclusion. First, deliberating who deserves recognition requires comparing suffering (Weheliye, 2014). Second, juridical humanity erases the subjects of violence in exchange for possession of one’s personhood (Esmeir, 2006; Harris, 1993; Weheliye, 2014). Third, there is a nonreciprocal politics of recognition for colonial subjects or those whose personhood was once not one’s own possession (Coulthard, 2014). Together these critiques of the precondition of suffering or dehumanization highlight the ways the promise and practice of inclusion reproduces the same colonial violence as exclusion.
Furthermore, impossibility of inclusion is predicated on exclusion of slaves, thus constituting the free human being as always already a racialized property relation. For Harris (1993), commodification of human life in slavery not only built personhood on expectations of white privilege and supremacy. It also made whiteness the possession of being fully human (or the property of inalienability) and made blackness the object of property (or the property of alienability). This entanglement between race and property in turn becomes naturalized as the codification of existing relations instead of as an effect of active and ongoing practices of sovereign power. As in John Locke’s proclamation “every man has a property in his own person,” this racialized history of property is most naturalized in the form of personhood as possession of one’s physical and psychic self (Harris, 1993: 1735). At the same time constitution of slave humanity as legal recognition of hybrid person property can only articulate racialized promise of full personhood as part and parcel of intensifying subjugation of the enslaved (Hartman, 1997). In turn, it is the particular constitution of blackness as alienable that enables the ontological power of law to transform objects of possession into subjects of ownership while simultaneously prohibiting black life access to the inalienability of personhood (Weheliye, 2014: 78). To be clear, Weheliye (2014) states the constitution of personhood qua whiteness does not negate the genocidal effects on indigenous populations, but “rather represents different properties of the same racializing juridical assemblage that differentially produces both black and native subjects as aberrations from Man and thus not-quite-human” (p. 79).
Weheliye and Esmeir’s analyses make visible that the legal status of being human is always about both sameness and difference. In contrast to accounts of the necessary individuality of personhood rights and the universal sameness of the human subject, the rule of law as a colonial technology does not just depend on atomization of a common unit but also on difference and creation of classes and collectivities. As juridical constitution of individualized being (personhood) becomes universalized through species norms of embodied whiteness, “access to personhood as property” becomes managed and delimited by generating differences within collective being (juridical humanity) (Weheliye, 2014: 79). Esmeir (2006: 1547) argues personhood status is predicated on membership in some class, and these classifications come to articulate “what or who human is.” In turn, legal status of persons is both constitutive of and nonisomorphic with human beings. By bringing into being what is and isn’t human, practices of personhood not only render certain humans not quite human, but they also render certain nonhumans persons—as can be seen, under certain legal regimes, with the inclusion of animals, corporations, and other nonhuman entities as classes or categories of persons (Esmeir, 2006: 1547). That is, there is not a dichotomy between persons as inalienable, with intrinsic value, and property as alienable, with instrumental value. Rather, there is the juridical person through the racialized commodification of human life. Seen in this way, extending personhood to nature as an alternative to the commodification of life and human–nature dualism (i.e. RoN) attaches properties of whiteness to nature and naturalizes being human as a property of whiteness.
In sum, the rights-bearing citizen was founded on notions of property, in which personhood rights were based on sovereign possession of oneself; although originally founded on limited recognition of sovereign persons as white, straight, property-owning men, an enduring strategy of colonial technologies of governance has been to expand the sphere of recognition to incorporate new subjects (Barker and Puar, 2002; Brown, 1995; Foucault, 2007; Weheliye, 2014). The paradox is that terms of inclusion are based on the degree one differs from the original subject of rights such that demands for juridical recognition uphold both the supremacy of whiteness and the slicing of difference into identity-based categories (Barker and Puar, 2002; Brown, 1995; Weheliye, 2014).
While this opens up questions concerning the ways blackness and indigeneity differentially articulate within the propertied racialization of personhood, for our purposes we maintain the production of inside/outside as the white supremacy or antiblackness that constitutes the juridical human via socioeconomic relations of slavery, while we focus on how indigeneity figures to purify rights as outside western colonial and neoliberal development. It is in this context that we examine how the figure of indigeneity becomes an imperative within RoN, and we do so without arguing for or against, why or to what effect, indigenous actors have put rights to use strategically (Andolina et al., 2009; Rojas, 2013; Sieder and Vivero, 2017; Valladares and Boelens, 2017). As Radcliffe (2017) suggests, attending to the dynamics of coloniality/indigeneity, as a set of practices necessary for decolonizing the relation between the category and its referent, requires examining the strategies through which indigeneity becomes abstracted from “specific indigenous localities” (p. 224) and signaled through the “positionings of settler, nation-state, development, whiteness… among many others” (Radcliffe, 2017: 221).
By drawing on decolonial accounts of how an episteme of rights naturalizes inside/outside relations, we conceptualize juridicalization as a tool for naturalizing the coloniality of existence. We also denaturalize RoN as an epistemic community that paradoxically depends on entrenching juridicalization to overcome colonial modes of existence. Against this naturalization, the next section demonstrates that RoN is a spatially intensive cluster of actors that draw on western holism and jurisprudence to present nature’s rights as a natural alternative to colonial western development.
RoN as a TPN
Following actors and institutions
By tracing RoN as an epistemic community, we show the naturalization of RoN through in/visibility of certain epistemic actors, or, in other words, how RoN does not float free from juridical authority. In this section, we follow and connect practices that materially generate the seemingly coherent epistemic reach of something identifiable as RoN (or the material and epistemic conditions of RoN as a TPN). In so doing, we also demonstrate the outsized role played by those with juridical authority. In denaturalizing RoN as an epistemic community, we then set the stage for another level of denaturalization in the next section. That is, we ultimately, not only denaturalize the way RoN floats free from a particular epistemic community, but also denaturalize the way rights in RoN floats free from colonial modes of existence. Given that our methodological interest is to trace threads that branch in multiple directions, linear writing poses an obstacle; our strategy is to follow individual threads, circling back, dropping others, and abruptly picking up some elsewhere.
Founding organizations of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.
Current executive committee of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (as of 8/17).
Four months earlier, the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME) was presented at the People’s World Conference in Bolivia, mobilized against UN-led market environmentalism. UDRME served as rallying platform for indigenous movements, women’s organizations, and other conservation and human rights groups. The Declaration was written by one of the conference’s 17 working groups and was open to discussion through online comments and a preconference meeting of indigenous people’s organizations. Lead author and copresident of the working group was Cormac Cullinan, director of the executive committee of the Global Alliance, and also CEO/director of South Africa-based environmental law and green economy consultancy firms EnAct International (started in UK) and Cullinan & Associates Inc. (Cullinan, n.d.). Regarding UDRME, Cullinan (2011: 187–188) described the process as collaboration among incredibly diverse interests: “to find the words to express… their perspective in legal language which the international community could understand” was “remarkably coherent, consistent, and detailed.” Yet, this coherence is not so remarkable given language in UDRME draws directly from earlier Universal Declaration on Planetary Rights which noncoincidentally was written by Cullinan and his coworker Polly Higgins (The Gaia Foundation, n.d. Earth law precedents). Through this seminal and frequently cited example we begin to show how the legal language of rights is not so serendipitous.
In addition to being lead author of UDRME, Cullinan is also author of the highly cited Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (2002/2011), a book commissioned and funded by the Gaia Foundation. Also part of the Global Alliance, Gaia Foundation formed in London during the 1980s. Its focus is indigenous knowledge, community governance, and environmental conservation. Involved in almost every RoN report, conference, and workshop worldwide, the Gaia Foundation has also become primary partner and founder for the swath of local organizations that function as the network of allies in this supposed convergence. In the words of cofounder and director Liz Hosken (2011: 33), the Foundation actively facilitates “intercultural exchanges” that “stimulate the indigenous memory both within the southern and in the northern hemisphere” as a way to “remember our roots” that have been “smothered for generations.” As one example of their network building role, from 2004 through 2009, Gaia Foundation and Colombia-based Gaia Amazonas brought leaders from the African Biodiversity Network to visit indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon so they could learn how to “revive their cultural traditions and secure legal recognition of their authority to govern their sacred territories according to Earth-centered customs” (The Gaia Foundation, n.d. Story of earth jurisprudence).
Pachamama Alliance and Fundación Pachamama are founding members of the Global Alliance that also demonstrate the transnational ties linking northern environmental organizations to indigenous movements. The Pachamama Alliance was founded in the US in the 1990s by social entrepreneurs Bill and Lynne Twist. They founded the organization after visiting the Achuar of Ecuador and Peru, responding to what they describe as requests for “allies from the north” (Pachamama Alliance, 2015). Fundación Pachamama was formed in Ecuador within the following year as a “sister organization” of Pachamama Alliance; its roles included “official monitor of UNDP investment in the Amazon region” (Morningstar and Palmer, 2014). The foundational ties between San Francisco-based Pachamama Alliance and Ecuador-based Fundación Pachamama are particularly relevant given the role Ecuador, and Fundación Pachamama specifically, play in the discourse of RoN as a bottom-up, indigenous phenomenon.
Law schools also perform multiple functions as key institutional actors and sites for concentrated practices of discursive elaboration. For example, School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University, Australia, launched an Earth Laws Network that contributes to legitimizing Earth jurisprudence by linking organizations that identify rights for nature among their objectives. In 2014, they also launched an Australian Wild Law Judgment Project, which invites scholars to “re-writ[e] a wide range of different judgments—found in any area of law…–from a Wild or Earth Laws perspective” in order to “challenge the hegemony of anthropocentrism in the common law” (Maloney and Rogers, n.d.). This project led to recent publication of the book, Law as if Earth Really Mattered: The Wild Law Judgment Project (2017), including a contribution from Cullinan, the book was edited by Dr Nicole Rogers, lawyer and lecturer at Southern Cross University, and Michelle Maloney.
On the executive committee of Global Alliance, Maloney is not only cofounder and national convenor of Australian Earth Laws Alliance but has “spoken about Earth Jurisprudence and Wild Law at more than 100 events over the past three years” (AELA, n.d.). She “created Australia’s first university level course on Earth Laws” at Griffith University (AELA, n.d.). In 2014, Maloney and another key actor tied to law schools in Australia, Peter Burdon, published their edited collection Wild Law: In Practice. Burdon has served not only as senior lecturer at University of Adelaide law school but also as deputy chair for IUCN ethics specialist group, as member of the steering committee for the Ecological Law and Governance Association, as deputy director for Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment in Australasia, and most notably from 2011 to 2012 as an executive committee member for the Global Alliance. Interestingly, IUCN is also the outlet through which Burdon (2011a) published his widely recognized article “Earth Rights: The Theory.” While organizing the third annual Australian Wild Law conference, Burdon (2011b) also released his edited compilation Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence, which included contributions from Cormac Cullinan, Mari Margil, Polly Higgins, and Liz Hosken.
However, it is Cullinan’s book Wild Law (introduced above) that seems to have played the largest role in spurring this whirlwind of activity. For example, soon after the director of UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA) came across the first edition of Cullinan’s book (2011: 183), the professional association organized UK’s first annual wild law retreat and conference and has since continued to be a key actor in organizing RoN conferences. Subsequently, numerous Wild Law conferences and workshops were held across Australia, UK, and US. The fourth UK Wild Law conference, organized by UKELA and Gaia Foundation, led to the 2009 Wild Law report, which developed a set of indicators to empirically evaluate if and where there is “any evidence of Earth Jurisprudence in existing Law and Practice.” As the report opens, dressing the page are quotes of celebratory praise by Cormac Cullinan, Vandana Shiva, and Thomas Berry.
Thomas Berry, whose ideas we discuss more in the next section, gave his last overseas talk in 2003 at the May Summit in London. In reflecting on the culmination of Berry’s life and work, Liz Hosken (2011: 29), from the Gaia Foundation, later proclaimed, “Thomas was adamant that Earth Jurisprudence was the correct term” and in reference to the 2003 gathering and beyond, states “our job was to make the idea more accessible!.” Before Berry died in 2009, he, along with Cullinan and representatives from Gaia Foundation, assisted in drafting a Land, Environment, and Culture policy for Kenya (which did not pass the new Kenyan Constitution). As a prolific writer, Berry’s frequently quoted, referenced, cited, and suggested publications include his 1992 book The Universe Story, 1999 book The Great Work, 2003 essay “The Origin, Differentiation and Role of Rights,” and 2006 book Evening Thoughts, which specifically laid out his “10 principles of Earth Jurisprudence.” Crucially, these texts do not just contain ideas that parallel RoN, but other authors frame his work as the wellspring of the movement toward Earth Jurisprudence. Examples of this framing include several publications already mentioned, including Cullinan’s 2002/2011 book Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, 2009 Wild Law report, 2011 collection Exploring Wild Law: The Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence, 2014 collection Wild Law: In Practice, 2017 collection Law as if Earth Really Mattered: The Wild Law Judgment Project, Gaia Foundation’s story of earth jurisprudence webpage, and Burdon’s 2011 “Earth Rights: The Theory” (discussed below), among many others we do not discuss here.
Another sign of Berry’s significance is the Center for Earth Jurisprudence (CEJ) at the School of Law at Barry and St Thomas University in Orlando, Florida, founded in 2006 to advance Berry’s work. Partners with CEJ include a now familiar set of organizations: Gaia Foundation, Australian Earth Law Alliance, and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. Barry School of Law launched the Environmental and Earth Law Journal, a student-led online publication, and also inaugurated a RoN speaking tour across 11 law schools throughout the US. Convening the 2007 speaking tour was Cormac Cullinan (2011: 184) and attorney Thomas Linzey, executive director of Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), another founding organization of the Global Alliance and head of the Alliance’s legislative working group.
CELDF was founded in Pennsylvania in 1995 by Linzey and Stacy Schmader, “to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature” (CELDF, n.d.). CELDF began translating this mission into legally binding laws for communities starting in 1998. In 2006, Tamaqua, Pennsylvania became the first community in the US to adopt legally binding language granting “inalienable rights” to “natural communities,” and since then CELDF has provided templates and close assistance for similar ordinances passed in over three dozen communities in 10 states spread across the country. CELDF not only contributes to new RoN policy landscapes occurring in US but also has partnered with communities to advocate for RoN in Nepal, India, Australia, Colombia, Cameroon, and Sweden. Linzey and CELDF’s associate director, Mari Margil, even played a role in Ecuador’s groundbreaking constitution. Invited by Fundación Pachamama (discussed above) they assisted the Constituent Assembly of Ecuador draft the world’s first Constitutional recognition for RoN. According to Mario Melo (an Ecuadorian environmental and human rights attorney advising Fundación Pachamama) (2013: 34), it was CELDF’s work in the US that provided critical precedent for revising the Ecuadorian Constitution.
Melo also references the importance of the work of US legal expert Christopher Stone. Discussed more below, here we want to note the significance of Stone’s work in this TPN. As with Ecuador, Stone’s work contributed to the case for rights for the Whanganui River in New Zealand, in particular regarding the logic of guardianship developed in the agreement between the Crown and the Iwi (Kennedy, 2013: 32). More broadly, there are numerous memorializations of Stone’s seminal 1972 publication “Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” including the 1974 printed edition with foreword by Garrett Hardin, 1996 collection of essays, 2010 third edition, and the “40 years on” 2012 special issue in Journal of Human Rights and the Environment reflecting on contemporary value of Stone’s original text. Additionally, his body of work not only proliferates citations of academic publications advancing RoN but is increasingly referenced in course syllabi, media reports, and various NGO documents.
In sum, the spatially intensive cluster of environmental organizations; law firms; legal nonprofits; law schools; and legal professional associations in the US, UK, and Australia intertwine with the framing of RoN to produce a narrative of scaling up—whereby local practices are juxtaposed as outside global structures—and therefore the consensus around rights presents as a natural convergence rather than the outcome of a lot of hard work. Naturalizing RoN in this way not only makes the TPN invisible except as an expression of widespread convergence but it also unhinges the promise of rights from properties of juridical humanity. Those mobilizing the language of rights provide the conditions for forming produced consensus among particular practitioners and at the same time make opaque the embodied act of mobilizing juridical language. They in turn proffer the appearance of RoN as a demand of the juridically excluded and subjugated. In this light, our demonstration of RoN as a narrow epistemic community not only allows us to treat juridicalization as an active set of practices, but also allows us to link it back to colonial constitution of existence. The next section demonstrates how RoN extends the making of colonial subjects by extending juridical humanity (remaking what is inside and outside colonial recognition of existence) in ways that dovetail with particular notions of holism and indigeneity.
Holism and rights in western environmentalism
While focusing more on central ideas animating RoN, this section continues the methodological and narrative strategy of tracing networks of connections—including citations—and following some of the people introduced above. That is, we build off the argument from the proceeding section on the invisibility of an epistemic community deeply imbricated with juridical authority. We do so by connecting it to an episteme of rights that the RoN TPN not only unhinges from juridical authority but makes commensurable with holistic truths of nature and indigenous–environment relations. By tracing how the epistemic community draws on rights in ways that do not link colonial modes of existence to juridicalization, but rather in ways that link holism and indigeneity to rights as the limits of coloniality, we show that RoN paradoxically entrenches colonial modes of existence.
To start, we return to Peter Burdon, who in his 2011 article “Earth Rights: The Theory” avers that Earth rights are conceptualized first and foremost as not legal, or even proto-legal, but as a universal ethical demand. Burdon cites Roderick Nash’s 1989 book Rights of Nature, in which Nash argued this conception stems from natural law. Moreover, further citing Nash, Burdon grounds all modern rights discourses within this tradition of natural law. The human rights (or Rights of Man) used to justify the American and French Revolutions in the 18th century were constituted on the basis of “laws of nature and of nature’s God” as two sides of the same coin, revealing the “self-evident truth” that “all men are created equal” in their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Burdon, 2011a: 3, citing Nash’s discussion of Thomas Jefferson). Elsewhere Burdon (2013: 832) writes that ultimately it is Earth Jurisprudence as the recognition of “interconnectedness and mutual dependence of the entire Earth Community” that offers the “foundation and supports the conditions” for these inalienable truths to “thrive.” Situated within a teleology of natural law, in which the end realizes the origin, Earth Jurisprudence offers an extension of juridical sovereignty in the name of a supra-human natural and divine sovereignty.
Burdon notes that recognition under Rights of Man only included human subjects, but he argues that “the tendency of natural rights to take on expanded meaning has become ‘one of the most exciting characteristics of the liberal tradition’” (Burdon, 2011a: 3–4, quoting Nash 1989). In so doing, he neglects that the constitution of legal person as free human depended on the alienability of Black humanity for enslaved labor and thus he obscures the inside/outside relation between human and Man or legal persons. For Burdon, extending the moral sphere of liberalism beyond the conflated human/Man started with Jeremy Bentham (1948: 311). For Bentham, the ethical-cum-legal question and thus barometer for intrinsic value ought “not [be], can they reason? nor can they talk? but can they suffer?” (Burdon, 2011a: 4 quoting Bentham). In this way, both RoN and nonhuman animal rights projects depend on Bentham as a precursor for developing an expanded juridical humanity that includes nonhuman nature in the name of a universal ethics of intrinsic value.
An even more robust discursive precedent for legitimizing claims for nature’s legal standing with inalienable rights is Christopher Stone’s (1972) publication “Should Trees Have Standing,” discussed briefly above. This article, published in University of Southern California Law Review, not only provides an argument grounded in historical tendencies of liberalism, but also lays out how to operationalize legal standing in relation to representation and guardianship, how rights of the environment vary in contrast to human rights, how an injury to nature is defined, and what it means for the environment to be its own beneficiary. Furthermore, his work was then cited by US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in his dissent to the case of Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), where the judge claimed, “protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their preservation.” Interestingly, Stone conceptualizes the violations of nature’s rights or interests in being through analogy to copyright law. By configuring violations as a form of “pirating,” costs can be abstractly determined in ways that parallel an “invasion of a property interest” (Stone, 1972: 29). Given such a conceptualization of “interests in being,” the violation of nature’s rights becomes translated into monetized reparations that enter into a trust fund administered by a guardian, and thus cover respective legal fees as well as investments in preserving the “natural object as close as possible to its condition at the time the environment was made a rights-holder” (Stone, 1972: 33). What is fascinating is that the dualism between person and property that undergirds the diagnosis and solution posited by RoN surfaces in the earlier work of Stone but for Stone it is far from dichotomous; rather the way person and property are intertwined is what makes rights work!
While Stone solely depends on the law’s own terms to develop his argument for rights, Thomas Berry offers a much more expansive account of rights that joins religious universalism with cultural convergence to articulate existence and nature beyond the self and the human. As we already demonstrated, numerous authors accredit Berry and his proliferation of work across several decades with solidifying and codifying the concepts of Wild Law and Earth Jurisprudence as an extension of natural law. Berry (2001b, 2006) identifies three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat or a place to be, and the right to fulfill one’s role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community. Given the juridico-religious premise that the “universe is a communion of subjects and not a collection of subjects” (Swimme and Berry, 1992: 243) these rights in turn apply to every “component of the Earth community, both living and nonliving” alike (Berry, 2001b, 2006). For Berry, holism and rights originate with existence. Indeed, he suggests a perfectly isomorphic relation between the embodied materiality of existence and the incorporeal discursive world of rights, through which “that which determines existence determines rights” (Berry, 2001b, 2006) and rights are merely “defined as giving every being its due” (Berry, 2001b).
There is, however, a curious qualification in Berry’s work. He claims both that “wild laws are laws that regulate humans in a manner that creates the freedom for all the members of the Earth Community” and that these freedoms align to one’s “role in the continuing co-evolution of the planet” (Cullinan, 2011: 31 emphasis added). Therefore, this holistic notion depends on a fundamental yet unacknowledged inequality between the whole and the parts. The idea of life itself (the undifferentiated whole) as both the basis of existence for all differentiated parts of life and the object of maintenance for each of these parts suggests all of the differentiated parts benefit as they serve the undifferentiated whole (Foucault, 1980, 2007; Lemke, 2011). Given this necessary relation between the parts and the whole, enforcing parts that fail to appropriately accord (in their differentiated roles) to the collective body ultimately naturalizes the actions of the sovereign (to discriminate between parts) in the name of mutually benefiting the whole and the differentiated bodies interdependent on the whole. While articulated as a property of life itself the logic of sameness and difference mobilizes the precise conditions that make possible juridical humanity, as defined earlier with reference to Esmeir. In so doing, the juridical doubles inclusion as the possibility of exclusion, the ability to grant subjecthood as the ability to withdraw it, and therefore naturalizes sovereign power as a holistic self-organizing model of life. RoN in effect mobilizes a history of the expanding sphere of rights as within a natural law tradition of liberalism unhinged from colonial techniques of governance. The result is that the history of affording the legal status of person to the formerly enslaved, women, children, and disabled people (all “at one point” deemed nature, external, and inferior to the definition of being fully human) functions not as a problem of juridicalization but as a testament to the ontological fallacy of the human/nature dualism (Cullinan, 2011; European Citizens Initiative, 2014; Stone, 1972; Suarez, 2013).
It is worth remembering that, especially within American environmentalism, holistic conceptions of nature have been a continuous cornerstone for more than a century, from the romantic impulses of the 19th century preservationism to ideas of Deep Ecology a century later (Nash, 1989). Indeed, after Bentham, Burdon’s genealogy mobilizes Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (1949), which recognizes “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” and proposes to “change the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it” (Leopold, 1966: 239, 240). For Burdon (2011a: 4), Leopold’s holistic ethics requires “a body of self-imposed limitations on freedom,” an idea that again repeats the whole–part relationship. This is taken up, too, in Deep Ecology, which, in contrast to a shallow ecology that still privileges the subjectivity of human beings, emerged in the 1970s–1980s as the more complete dissolution of the human through self-realization that recognizes the whole as the self and the self as the whole (Devall and Sessions, 1985; Naess, 1973). Across these diverse environmentalist concerns for human/nature dualism, there is pivot away from sovereignty of the human toward holistic entanglement with the conditions that make all life possible and, thus, toward the sovereignty of nature. This ascription of sovereign properties to nature enacts Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity in making nature more like people.
Within RoN it is science that provides the basis for not only an environmental ethics toward human nature but an institutional recognition of intrinsic value in terms of inalienable rights. Scientific advancement discovers holistic truths that not only undo the fallacy of dualism that plague western law and politics but show the dualism to be unnatural. In turn, today’s “last dualism” to overcome, between people and environments, becomes an effect of political impasse yet-to catch up with scientific knowledge of the world (Cullinan, 2011; European Citizens Initiative, 2014). RoN posits political reality today is governed “on the basis of a discredited 17th century understanding of how the universe functions”; the scientific realities of “‘new physics’ based on quantum theory, [and] developed by scientists such as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, and Werner Heisenberg” reject the worldview of “Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton” by revealing that the “universe is a single integral whole composed of a dynamic network of relationships” (Cullinan, 2011: 46–47). By the late 20th century, these shifts in physics and metaphysics made possible an evolutionary–ecological thinking that elaborated the grounds for normative claims in the name of life itself. Especially notable is the Gaia hypothesis, the proposition of microbiologist Lynn Margulis and chemist and earth scientist James Lovelock. Combining Margulis’s work on symbiogenesis and Lovelock’s on self-regulation of Earth’s systems, they bring together technological/cybernetic concepts and notions of the super-organism to propose that the Earth, as an ensemble of living systems, is itself a living being—repeating the whole–part relationship articulated also by Berry.
However, science is treated in RoN as only a western convergence on universal indigenous ideas, which are outside of modern time. RoN mobilizes indigenous cosmology as always already embodying holistic models of life. As stated in Thomas Berry’s Airlie Principles, achievement of Earth Jurisprudence as a “viable mode of human presence on the planet” is dependent upon the central guiding reference of “various indigenous peoples and remaining wilderness areas” (Berry, 2001a). Indeed, in equating indigenous peoples and pristine environments, the evacuation of social relations mobilizes human–nature entanglements not as spatiotemporally dynamic socionatural systems but as a transcendent singularity, whereby, as posited by Liz Hosken (2011: 27), of the Gaia Foundation, the “governance systems of indigenous communities do not come from the individual interests of their leaders” but from “accountab[ility] to a higher law, beyond human interest.” In turn, Hosken (2011: 27) claims that “what Thomas had identified was the legal principle which is universal to all indigenous governance systems.” In other words, in RoN there is convergence on holism from nonwestern cosmologies and from numerous contemporary disciplines from physics to philosophy. Cullinan (2011: 48) articulates this parallel convergence as the simultaneous possibility of using “language and insights of modern physics to explain these ideas” as “teachings of many spiritual and philosophical traditions to arrive at the same point.” Although arriving at the same nondualistic ontology, the Wild Law Report, following Cullinan, claims that the “objective, scientific approach of measurement, empirical observation and verifiable recording” is “derived from the modern Western mind,” whereas the “more intimate and sometimes intuitive experiential mode of connecting with the natural world and understanding it, as it were, from within” is situated in terms of “indigenous peoples” (Filgueira and Mason, 2009: 3). The frame here enacts a temporal dichotomy whereby indigenous knowledge is universal and fixed across time, in contrast to mainstream knowledge that unfolds progressively (Jackson, 2014; Todd, 2016). This temporality enacts not only a denial of modernity to the figure of indigeneity but furthermore erases the dispossession that coproduces modernity and indigeneity (Radcliffe, 2017: 223).
To rephrase, holistic models of nature from providential legacies to new excitement over complex, adaptive emergent system depends on, even helps generate the liminal indigenous figure that is both internal to the story of modernity and outside modernity as its conditions of possibility. In this telling, there has been scientific progression from a fallacious dualist ontology to the vitalist truth of a holistic ontology. The colonial technology of juridical recognition and subject formation is framed as politics catching up with science, which is coterminous with universal indigenous cosmology. This understanding of indigeneity, which naturalizes its liminal position outside and inside modernity, gestures to how the mobilization of “rights” as an “indigenous” alternative to western precepts also naturalizes rights as both inside and outside colonial modes of governance. By grounding juridical recognition in intrinsic value determined by holistic findings of modern science, it is precisely through imbrication between inside and outside the specific legacies of western thought that proponents pose RoN as a universally converging truth.
Conclusions
By illustrating how the power relations that animate modernity can also animate its alternatives, our findings challenge easy celebrations of RoN as a universal (yet nonwestern) truth. We have shown that rights are the key framework for alternative notions of environment and development not because they are a universal, natural, or neutral truth, but because of how they dovetail with existing and powerful scientific and legal ideas about holism, legal personhood, and indigeneity. This is not to say that all RoN arguments are the same and universal, but rather the different ways they pull on these various elements (of personhood, nonhuman agency, western dualism, and indigenous–environment relations) still work to support the naturalization of rights. Our work certainly does not answer how or why rights are taken up strategically in RoN—that is a different, ethnographic project. But treating RoN as a TPN helps put rights back in history, which would seem to be the point of RoN anyway, as a response to colonial notions of time. Through disentangling the relational politics between key actors, institutions, and texts, we argue that the idea that people around the world have independently arrived at the idea of nature’s inherent rights is a powerful story that is an effect not of its ontological or moral self-evidence, but rather of the extensive connections made by intensive networking—and the work of holism and rights in erasing those precise connections through naturalization. That is, we are arguing that invisibility of this TPN—the constellation of ideas and the bodies and spaces in which they circulate—is not incidental but internally necessary. And if holism elaborates a naturalization of rights and an order of the human constituted through the sameness and difference of the indigenous figure, then in the name of undoing the human–nature dualism as a mark of colonialism, RoN obscures the ontological politics of colonial modes of recognition. As we have shown, western ideas (about humans, nature, and their relation) gain their power and are tools of power precisely through their relation to indigeneity as an aberration of man that undoes the duality of nature (as localized brute matter) and humans (as universalized immateriality). This makes evident a different dovetailing between the figure of indigeneity and Esmeir’s notion of personhood (juridical humanity) as the simultaneous attribution and revocation of possessing humanness.
In turn, we situate the extension of personhood rights to life labeled rivers, trees, and the earth at large within a historical reading of late liberal strategies that reproduce (and further naturalize) the colonial order of things as an enduring process of juridicalization. In so doing, instead of oppositions or even unintended consequences we claim the intractability of commodification (and state–capital relations) to be constitutively linked to the intractability of rights. Accordingly, it is no surprise that in the face of a growing “green” capitalism that “rights of nature” presents as an idea whose time has come. Furthermore, it is also no surprise that literature that has investigated how the effects of implementing rights for nature has played out in practice have not found any decisive threats to state–capital but rather increasing extractivism and state power. From the perspective of Hartman, where the forms of humanity granted a slave can only intensify relations of subjugation, the intensification of extractivism not only makes sense but is part and parcel of the possibilities a logic of rights for nature unleashes. Through examining the emancipation of slavery, Hartman and other black scholars have long pointed to the contradictions in the external ascription of the possession of freedom. This same paradox surfaces in the scientists, lawyers, and environmentalists that argue for granting inalienable rights as the recognition of intrinsic value of all forms of life, thus raising the question about how the relation between alienability and blackness shapes the policing of indigeneity and “nature.” In following the notion of the human as undergirded by an entanglement of property and person, our analysis is not that rights for nature is really anthropocentric or anthropomorphic, but rather that posing the problem as anthropocentrism can only fetishize the human as Man. In hiding the way that rights differentially distributes this entanglement of person and property along racialized lines, the critique of anthropocentric dualism reproduces hierarchies of existence in terms of variegated degrees of humanness.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.