The legal personhood of natural phenomena, as discussed by Philippe Sands in his review of Is a River Alive, the new book by Robert Macfarlane, and Just Earth: How a Fairer World Will Save the Planet by Tony Juniper (“A root-and-branch vision”, Books, Life & Arts, FT Weekend, April 26) is not new, and not necessarily transformative.
German professor Gunther Teubner described almost 20 years ago how in medieval and Renaissance Europe non-humans populated the legal world. Rats were prosecuted for destroying barley crops and at least one dog was imprisoned for a year.
Between the ninth and 19th century, more than 200 cases were recorded of non-humans being tried as legal subjects. Although Ecuador’s constitution was amended in 2008 to recognise actionable rights of nature, case law there and elsewhere is patchy with sometimes only nominal reference to such rights, while licences for activities damaging the environment continue to be awarded.
In short, attributing rights to nature may satisfy moral ambitions but is not necessarily always effective in protecting the environment (itself an anthropocentric term). As Teubner notes, it may just represent law’s “relentless rule production”.
I would argue the international crime of ecocide, as proposed by Sands and others, is itself a “stubbornly anthropocentric” notion (and Sands dismisses Juniper’s account arguing “it doesn’t begin to approach the fundamentals of our inhumanities to nature, or how to address them”).
But at least we can replace the medieval prosecution of rats for wantonly destroying farmers’ crops with the prosecution of people for unlawful or wanton acts likely to cause severe damage to the environment. If anthropocentric efforts can be effective to protect the environment, then let’s support them.
And this from someone who was very nearly carried off by the Rio Napo in the Ecuadorean Amazon.
Marina Brilman
The Hague, The Netherlands
