Fernando Kaskais posted: " Duri Baek for Noema Magazine The philosopher Jonathon Keats wants to incorporate the world's plants and animals into our democratic systems. BY BOYCE UPHOLT Boyce Upholt is a writer and editor based in New Orleans. He is currently working on a b" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
Boyce Upholt is a writer and editor based in New Orleans. He is currently working on a book for W.W. Norton about how the Mississippi River has been changed and altered, and what that will mean for its future.
Anyone who has come home from the grocery store with a few too many bananas knows the perils of this fruit. Sometimes as much as half a harvest can be lost before reaching market. That's why farmers tend to gather the bananas while they're still green and hardy. The trick is to find a way to get the bananas to ripen quickly once they're ready to sell.
There is a simple solution, practiced everywhere from Brazil to Africa: wrap the bananas in bags alongside leaves from other trees. The leaves release ethylene, which is both a stress hormone and a ripening agent. It's an ingenious hack, coopting a biological process for human benefit. (It's also far preferable to the standard modern technique: spraying bananas in industrial-grade calcium carbide, which often contains impurities hazardous to human health.)
When the philosopher Jonathon Keats learned of this practice, he saw something far more consequential: this is a means to expand the cramped boundaries of democracy. Finally, we'll be able to tally the votes of the trees.
In 2006, frustrated that regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency couldn't — or wouldn't — stop companies from dumping toxic "biosolids" in nearby mining pits, the residents of a Pennsylvania town tried a new tactic: they passed an ordinance declaring that "ecosystems shall be considered 'persons.'" First conceived by a legal scholar more than three decades prior, the concept of granting natural entities' rights was meant to supercharge environmental protection by giving ecosystems the inherent right to exist untainted.
Though that Pennsylvania law has never been tested in court, subsequent "rights of nature" laws have had real consequences. In a ruling last year, Ecuador's highest court ruled that a rights-of-nature provision in the country's constitution forbid mining in a protected cloud forest. "The last three years have been an explosion of laws and campaigns towards the rights of nature," says Grant Wilson, the executive director of Earth Law Center, a nonprofit that helps develop such laws. A set of lakes, streams and a marsh in Florida sued a developer last year, attempting to stop the construction of a 1,900-acre housing development amid the adjoining streams and wetlands. The waterways, which had been granted legal rights in a landslide county vote, are the first (and still only) natural nonhuman entities to defend themselves in U.S. courts.
The case launched a wave of press coverage, though its outcome revealed as much about the limits of this legal concept as its promise. Florida's Republican-dominated legislature had already passed a law forbidding local municipalities from granting rights to nature, so a judge dismissed the suit.
"What if trees were named the owners of the land upon which they stood?"
While conservatives decry the rights-of-nature movement as, among other flaws, an attempt to "thwart human enterprise," there are also critics on the other side who say this revolution is not enough. The new laws in some ways mimic Indigenous cosmologies, which often describe a world where no sharp line divides human and nonhuman beings. Indigenous leaders have been instrumental in passing rights-of-nature laws in many countries, and several U.S. tribes have embraced the idea. Still, some Indigenous thinkers suggest that "rights" are a deeply Western concept that cannot capture the personal, reciprocal exchange between human and nonhuman beings. When we conceive of obligations to our family, after all, we do not typically talk about rights.
Even Wilson notes that while the concept is a powerful tool, it is just a beginning. "You write three words into a law or a constitution — "nature has rights' — and it's transformative. But really what we need are relationships with nature and whole systems of society that are in harmony with nature." Keats, who serves as Earth Law Center's consulting philosopher, goes further: extending rights of personhood to nonhuman nature is a "technological fix," he says — an incomplete cure that addresses the symptoms while the underlying pathology still festers. The laws passed over the past decade are valuable and important, he says, but ultimately shallow and superficial. As the case in Florida shows, they're easily undone....
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