More than Human Rights with César Rodríguez-Garavito

This episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast discusses legal personhood of nature, also known as rights of nature or more-than-human rights. Hosts Stephen Thomas, Hannah Wilson, and Diana Gusta sit down with lawyer and professor Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito, the founding director of the More-than-Human Life (MOTH) Collective.

The discussion covers the following key points:

• The historical context of the movement: While Western legal frameworks have only recently begun adopting rights for nature, the idea is rooted in the long-standing practices and beliefs of Indigenous cultures globally.
• A groundbreaking legal moment: The 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution is highlighted as a foundational moment for the modern rights of nature movement, being the first to enshrine these rights into law. This was the result of collaboration between Indigenous leaders and a diverse group of scientists, activists, and scholars.
• Ecocentric vs. Anthropocentric views: The hosts and guest explore the difference between framing nature protection as a human right (the right to a healthy environment) versus a right inherent to nature itself (more-than-human rights). Rodriguez-Garavito argues that viewing humans as part of a larger, interconnected web of life is a more durable and effective approach, as the health of human society is directly tied to the health of the biosphere.
• Practical challenges and cultural shifts: The conversation addresses challenges to implementing these laws, such as legal costs and governmental pushback. However, it is argued that these are not new problems for social change movements, as seen in the human rights movement. The discussion concludes by highlighting the importance of cultural change and shifting perceptions, stating that legal action is just one of many tools that can be used to advance this cause.

Links & Resources

• MOTH Life: An interdisciplinary initiative dedicated to the advancement of rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life. For more information, visit their website. https://mothrights.org/about/
• Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito: A lawyer and professor at NYU School of Law. He has written extensively on topics including more-than-human rights and climate change litigation. Profile
• Project CETI: A collaborative project to understand the acoustic communication of sperm whales using AI, mentioned as an example of scientific work that supports a more-than-human perspective. Link

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.

The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Transcript

Welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast. We're going to take a closer look at some of the solutions to counter biodiversity decline, and we'll find out more about the people behind these ideas.

Hello and welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast. I'm Stephen Thomas. I'm Hannah Wilson, and I'm a student at University of Oxford studying human sciences. And I'm Diana, and I'm studying biology at Oxford. Okay, and today we're going to be looking into legal personhood of nature, or rights of nature, or more than human rights. It's a fascinating topic and the two of you have already been looking into this. Have you found out anything interesting? Yes, so at its core, the framework represents the ability of persons to take legal action on behalf of natural ecosystems as opposed to on behalf of persons affected by environmental degradation. So, instead of protecting nature for the sake of human well-being, nature is protected because of its inherent value. Fascinating. And how about you, Hannah? What was kind of been your sort of insights so far? Yeah, so I found it really interesting looking at several case studies in Ecuador and New Zealand, evaluating the effectiveness of the implementation of rights of nature, and I've sort of been focusing more on the environmental personhood being based on indigenous cultures and the influence of ecocentric values in indigenous culture on Western legal systems. Yeah, that's fascinating. And it sounds like it's been around for millennia. It feels very new, I guess, to sort of Western culture, but actually this is something that's inherent in all of our cultures, going back to the earliest times. But the modern framework that I think groups like the MOTH Collective are putting on it really show that it can have legal impacts in certain cases, though it's still a very new field. But thankfully, we've got an expert to tell us more about that. So, who are you going to be talking to? Yeah, so today we're going to be talking to Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito. He's a lawyer and a professor at New York University School of Law and he also founded the More-than-Human Life Institute, which is abbreviated to MOTH.

Fantastic. Well, thank you both for your work, your research and your insights and we'll head over to your interview with Cesar. Thanks.

My name is Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito. I'm a professor of law at NYU School of Law and I'm the founding director of the More-than-Human or MOTH Life Collective, which is a group of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners from around the world that advance ideas and experiments for the protection of the More-than-Human world.

Thank you for your time today and we are very excited to dive into the topic. And to start off, could you explain broadly what environmental personhood is or um giving rights to more-than-human life? The rights of nature movement has been around for a few decades now. If you factor in the ideas and the advocacy and the practices of indigenous peoples, you can argue that it's been around for centuries and millennia. So, the Western incarnation of that idea really took off in the 1970s with some seminal contributions by scholars in different parts of the Americas, but then more recently, really for me, the foundational moment is the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, that for the first time enshrined rights of nature in its text. That was the result of the mobilization of indigenous leaders from the Amazon, from the Andes in collaboration with scientists, scholars, activists, who were interested in finding new ways of protecting the quote-unquote environment or nature, that would expand legal protection and moral consideration to non-humans, to animals, to plants, to fungi, to ecosystems like rivers or forests. So, one way to understand the rights of nature movement or how I or the way that I prefer to call it is more-than-human rights and we can talk about that in a moment can be seen as a as a as a new effort to further expand the circle of moral and legal consideration and protection, from humans to animals, to other forms of non-human life, so that we, as human beings, view them and engage with those more-than-human beings as subjects, as opposed to objects, as rights holders as opposed to commodities that we can dispose of and can manipulate at our will.

That sounds very interesting and the work you've been doing so far is very important. We were just wondering, since you have a background in human rights law, what inspired you to become an advocate for the rights of nature? The inspiration really came from indigenous nations. Specifically, I had the fortune of working with the Sarayaku Indigenous Nation of the Ecuadorian Amazon. They've been quite active and quite successful in lifting up the protection of the Ecuadorian Amazon, but more broadly, in weaving the protection of the Amazon and the protection of the climate system into a broader struggle for the protection of life on Earth. So, when I first went to the Sarayaku community, I was there as a human rights scholar activist. I was there to work with them on the implementation of a ruling that they had gotten, a positive ruling that they had gotten from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights that had said that the Ecuadorian government had violated that community's rights by not consulting with them before approving oil exploration in their territory. I was prepared to collect data and evidence to support their case for the implementation of that decision, but I soon realized that they were speaking about something much bigger than the right to participate in decision-making. They were speaking to me in very direct terms about the spirits of the forest, the fact that trees also have life and that is similar to ours, that the river speaks, that the mountains breathe. And that ecocentric, more animistic approach to the environment was completely new to me, coming from I was born in Colombia, I was raised in a city. I always loved nature, but I didn't have that that type of relationship with nature. So it took me a while, many years of interaction, not just with the Sarayaku people, but also with other movements and and colleagues from around the world. But then luckily, after 8 years or so of that type of work, I also realized that other nations, and not always indigenous nations, indigenous and non-indigenous communities, were pushing forward similar ideas. For example, just recently the Mar Menor in Spain, which is a lagoon system, got protected as a subject of rights by the Spanish parliament. There are currently more than 1,000, 500 initiatives advocating for the rights of non-humans around the world. Not all of them are successful, not all of them end in favorable rulings or or pieces of legislation, but as you can see, this has moved from being a peripheral idea to being closer to the mainstream of the human rights field. So that's been my own trajectory, but also kind of it it maps on to the trajectory of the field itself.

Right, so going from those around 5 over 500 initiatives, we want to understand more the similarities and differences between the legal frameworks and you were also mentioning the difference in terminology, so if environmental personhood means something different from the rights of nature to to more than human life. Yes, sort of the similarities and differences in the legal frameworks, but also maybe in the cultural context that they emerge in and if those differences or similarities have different implications. Yes, I think that they do, but I have to caveat this by saying that I think that it's not worth spending too much time debating the terminological differences. I'm enough of a practitioner to want to not get bogged down in terminological debates. Also because lawyers love that type of debates and I and I so I I try and the MOTH Collective that I lead tries to be more of a bridge as opposed to kind of being kind of picking on the differences between terminology and different terminology and approaches. Having said that, there are some historical differences and and nuances that are worth highlighting. So the word environment, of course, is embedded in the name of the movement, the environmental movement. This comes from a tradition of activism and research that sees the more-than-human world or quote-unquote nature as the other of humanity, as that which surrounds us, hence the name environment. While the environmental movement in the last 50 years or so has made incredibly important contributions, the that initial terminology that made it into the law in the form of the right to a healthy environment, which is the way that many cases and many initiatives of this sort are framed. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I myself have spent quite a bit of time as a scholar and as a lawyer trying to advance the application, the implementation of the of the right to health environment. My center at NYU just published a report on the right to health environment with UNEP, the UN Environmental Program. So all of that is crucial. Now, the problem with the that terminology and that approach is that it reinforces the duality, the separation between humans and non-humans. And that stands in contrast with what indigenous peoples have said all along, that we're embedded in the more-than-human world, that we are interdependent, but also what Western science has said. And not just ecology, but botany, mycology, climate science and and so on. So, in order to do justice for that interrelation, so in order to do justice to that view of the world that science has helped us illustrate and and and substantiate, that sees everything as interrelated as interdependent, the view that shows that all of us are ecosystems. We are, we contain multitudes of not just microbes, but all kinds of non-human cells. And we in turn are part of an organic whole that is bigger than us, the biosphere, the ecosystems that we are embedded in. So, in order to bring that point home in the law, the rights of nature movement has moved closer to an ecocentric understanding of the law. Nature as opposed to the environment and us as being a part of nature. The only reason why I suggest using the terminology more-than-human rights to speak of rights of nature is to further emphasize that point. And this has important implications. The more the term more-than-human was coined by eco-philosopher David Abram who's a member of the MOTH Collective and who did this, he coined that term in order to make it impossible to use terminology that where we could talk about the human without talking about the more-than-human. So human, humanity is embedded in, part of the more-than-human world, which is what is plainly visible to most of us that without the biosphere being in good health, the climate system, the air that we breathe, the water that we drink and so on, there is no way that we can guarantee and protect our own human rights. The right to food has no meaning if the soil is so depleted that human communities can no longer grow food without depending on pesticides and and agribusiness. So, that, the translation of that view is what I call more-than-human rights and the the the ultimate goal there is to say that human rights are not the the kind of the original template of the rights framework that we then extend to the more-than-human world, but to the contrary, that human beings can only be guaranteed as much as we guarantee the rights of forest, the rights of rivers, the rights of fungi and various species and ecosystems.

That's really interesting. Thank you. Um, some critics might argue that there are many practical challenges with implementing legal personhood to nature. For example, in Ecuador, citizens can advocate for the rights of nature. However, they have to pay for the legal costs, which is a disincentive, meaning that not many cases are brought to court. How do you think these practical challenges can be overcome?

Practical challenges exist in every form of social transformation effort. So if you, going back for a moment to human rights, any campaign, any proposal to draft a a piece of legislation, any form of litigation, they all incur costs, but also but not just financial costs. There are political costs and in some jurisdictions, some places, being a human rights or a more-than-human rights or a nature rights advocate can be very tricky, even even can put your life and your livelihood at risk. This is what's happening for example in Ecuador, I recently wrote a piece for the New York Times with a nature writer and friend Robert Macfarlane about the dismantling of environmental protections in Ecuador. So now the activists who have protected the Losedos Forest, this forest that was declared as a subject of rights by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, they're they're busy, yes, continuing to protect the forest, but these days also taking care of themselves because the government and some illegal actors are harassing them, and so that they have a hard time protecting the forest because there are many mining interests and other business interests that want to move into the forest. So, all of those are very real costs. Now, rights of nature and human rights advocates have really never been deterred by those costs. And sometimes the financial costs, well, the financial costs vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. For example, it's a lot more difficult from a financial point of view to sue in in in common law jurisdictions, like the US, relative to continental law jurisdictions, like Ecuador, where there is the the requirement of standing or the capacity to sue, the ability, the legal ability to sue is more generous than in jurisdictions like the US. So, that explains and this is the last thing I'll say, that explains why the sort of legal action thrives in some places more than in others. Because some countries are more open to this sort of legal actions. And this is no no coincidence that if you go and look at the numbers of the Eco Justice, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor, a website that keeps track of rights of nature litigation, you will see that litigation is heavily concentrated in in some jurisdictions, not everywhere, although it's that's changing, but the jurisdictions that are furthest along in incorporating and accepting and welcoming legal actions on rights of nature, they are the ones where we see most of the action.

With the rights of nature movement, which are picking up all around the world, and we see that there is uh quite an exponential increase in the number of initiatives. However, the evidence of the impact on an ecological scale um is quite interesting because interesting, because so far we've seen less evidence on of the impact that it has on ecosystems and I was wondering if this is just because of the novelty of the initiative and we haven't assessed the implications for nature recovery yet or if the cultural implications of the movement are at its core and what it's trying to achieve more than ecological restoration per se. Those are great considerations, really important question. We at the MOTH Collective care deeply about the impacts. This this so law can be seen as on the one hand a social transformation tool. Law does things in the world, right? By directing say government officials and judges and police forces to do things that affect people's behavior. So that's one instrumental function of the law. But the law also is a storytelling device. The law is a what linguists would call a performative force. It means that by saying something, it it it creates, it it it makes changes in the world. It it it it effectuates change in the world. So, for instance, the classical example is someone a a poet, a poet friend of someone can go to some of his friends and say, I pronounce you husband and wife. If the person saying that has no authority, then that's that's a joke or it's a little kind of moment of of of entertainment, but if this person is someone invested with the power of marrying two individuals, then that utterance makes all the difference in the world for those two people, right? Likewise, the law in general has the power of telling stories that have can potentially have traction in the real world. So, the question about the implementation is something that is crucial because once a case has been won, say the case of Los Cedros in Ecuador, or a piece of legislation has been passed, like the cases in in New Zealand that have all gone forward through acts of parliament that protect say a river ecosystem or a mountain ecosystem as a subject of rights, that has that pronouncement has the force of the law, but even so, one needs to ask the additional question of did that help protect or restore that ecosystem? Is the river in better shape as a result? 5 years down the road, is the forest thriving? Is it doing better than it was before that piece of legislation or that ruling? And because that is a crucial question, we've spent quite a bit of time monitoring the implementation of some of those cases. So we launched a report last year on the implementation of the of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador Ecuador's ruling on the Losedos Forest. And we showed using basically the the the indicators and the the the texts of the ruling as the baseline whether or not the government and the various public and private actors that were supposed to comply with the court order, whether they had done so. We used scientific evidence on the situation of different species in the ecosystem to say whether the forest was thriving or not. And of course, importantly, since the main outcome of the ruling had been the banning of mining in the territory, we verified whether the territory was mining-free. And we produced a report. The good news is that the ruling has been largely complied with, the mining is not happening in the territory. But to your point, I think that that is a question that everyone needs to keep asking because, and this is based on experience in the human rights world, you can have the perfect piece of legislation, you can have the perfect court ruling. If it doesn't make a difference on the ground, people will get disillusioned, disappointed with that particular approach. And ultimately, this is not just about innovative rulings and pieces of legal craftsmanship. This is about life on Earth and the ultimate question is, is that life thriving or not?

So do you think it's also the funding behind the human rights movement that's also a barrier to it having implications on the ground? Or the legal aspects of it? What are the barriers that are are stopping the impact on the ecological level?

So there are different types of impact that one needs to bear in mind in evaluating any intervention of this sort. There's the more direct material impact that we just talked about, whether the river is flowing with less pollution than it was before the ruling or before the piece of legislation or before the campaign. But there are also indirect impacts that are equally important. For example, one you asked about culture. The way the the most long-lasting effect that any legal intervention can have is changing people's minds and hearts. If you win a case, but you have to work so hard to say, if Losedos Forest is protected by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador as it was, but then it's only the guardians of the forest, only the local communities and then the like-minded allies around the world that have to do all the constant effort of pushing back against mining interests that are trying to encroach upon the territory, then that that can only go so far because funding is limited anywhere, people's attention gets diverted to new causes, that's not the only campaign in the world and so on. So really what can change those situations for good is changing the perceptions of enough people about the importance of the of the protection of cloud ecosystems and cloud forest like Losedos. So that when new threats come by, then there will be other defenders, and there will be other people that one has never met as a as a as an advocate or a lawyer in that particular case. So cultural change is crucial, emotional change is crucial. If people engage with rights of nature work more from the point of view of from and from an emotional disposition of of awe and wonder and and hope and as a result action, that can be more more durable than just one little flaring of outrage at a on social media that lasts one day and then of course there's a new outrageous thing happening the next day. So it's that dance between changes in the law and changes in culture and emotions that I think is is what's most promising as a strategy. And funding, yes, funding is definitely a challenge, all these collectives are working with very little money and resources, they they they're facing incredibly difficult odds. But I think that that's just one of a range of challenges and sometimes even if you have the funding, if you have the wrong strategy, then that's funding will not go very far.

Thank you. Where do you hope the rights of nature movement goes in the future?

Along the same lines of what we were discussing about cultural change, I'm hoping and I'm not hoping and I'm hopeful that the rights of nature movement is inspiring a lot of professionals, communities in very different regions of the world, in very different fields, to be more open to seeing the world as a web of life, to seeing themselves as one component in a broader world of the biosphere and all the forms of life that exist within it. That is of course a huge enterprise, to which rights of nature as a strategy and as a movement is just one contributor. It's equally important to do the hard work of protecting indigenous rights on the ground, of doing serious research in academia that substantiate what we know about the interconnectedness of life, for example, all the all the research has been done on fungi as the connective tissue of of the world and the ground. The work that is being done on animal language translation that we have been involved with on the legal repercussions, the legal aspect of that work with Project SETI, and there are spiritual communities, communities of faith doing important work. So, the aggregate effect of all of that is what I'm most hopeful about, and in that context the contribution of the law can be important, but it's only one one one component. What the law adds again is a a tool for action that can can can can channel some of that energy from other fields, like from science to the arts, to the humanities and beyond, which can hopefully in the when things go well, lead to positive change and positive outcomes, which in turn can kind of feed back into those fields and keep the circle of life and creativity alive and going.

Thanks so much for talking to us today, Cesar. It's been really interesting hearing more about the rights of nature movement and also your um your group, MOTH. Thank you.

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