Introduction to On the Rights of Nature with Pella Thiel

[Music] On the rights of nature, we follow the transformative movement where people, by challenging the foundations of law, shift the story of how human society relates with the living world. My name is Pellatil, I live on an island east of Stockholm, Sweden, and I will be your host. I am a student of life, and my academic background is in ecology, and somewhere along the line, I started to be troubled by how human law is not aligned with the laws of life, and I came across this movement of rights of nature, this is now a long time ago, it's more than a decade ago, and I became very fascinated by the transformative potential of this idea to obviously acknowledge that more than human beings have the right to existence and health and to thrive, but that this right can also be acknowledged by our institutions in the modern world, by law, for example. And I follow this movement, and it's totally fascinating, actually, how it has grown so much, it's really exploding all over the world, and I'm incessantly curious about how people work around this idea and the many shapes that it is taking, and especially in these times where the metacrisis, the rupturing, the dissolution, and the confusion makes it really easy to just give in and to lose faith in that we as humans can do better and organize ourselves in better and more respectful ways, and it's also really common to try to figure out where everything went wrong, to analyze, to deconstruct, and to give all your attention to the huge crisis at hand. But I believe that to take seriously the understanding that another world is not just necessary, but it's actually possible, that is way more demanding, to find other ways to begin the meticulous work of doing things differently is more difficult, but also more exciting, because there will be no paths to follow, no credible sources or strategies, it's like a big experiment, and I think this is where we find ourselves right now in this confusing transformation. As John and May see names it, the great turning, and to be able to open to this imagination of new ways of being human, we have to find something to hold on to, some common ground to stand on, acknowledging that more than human beings have their right to exist and thrive, regardless of their value to humans, is such a fundamental starting point. Rights of nature recognizes the ecological fact of our interconnectedness in a living world, and pairs it with the ethical perspective that all of life has inherent value, interests, and needs that ought to be respected. One of the pioneers of this movement, Thomas Barry, he said that we must say of the universe, that it is a communion of subjects, not the collection of objects. I think his choice of words here is so powerful, we must say that. Why? First, because it's true. Second, because in the culture we inhabit today, we treat the universe as a collection of objects, as stuff, possible to understand peace by peace, as property to be bought and sold, as something to be controlled and dominated for what we call development. This perception of reality is clearly not true and is becoming increasingly destructive. It's also very old. It has been part of Western culture since its cradle. Hundreds of years of institutions have been built upon this worldview. The voices that society has turned to, to tell truth from false, right from wrong, they have been in agreement about the right or even duty of human domination of the living world. From the Christian Church, which placed the soul exclusively in the human, put God outside of the world, devoid of soul, and humans to rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the others. During the enlightenment, this role of truth telling shifted to science, which successively got rid of all values except those instrumental to human uses. And with explicit mission to extend control and dominance over the universe, as Francis Bacon, father of modern science, put it. I think this worldview is meaningless and boring, apart from being false. It also has a huge problem. It doesn't accept limits. It has no break, no way of saying okay to hear but no further. This is enough. It has to just accelerate into the machine out into space. Since 2020, the mass of human-made stuff on Earth, the technosphere, is greater than the biosphere. There is more buildings, roads, cars, plastic bags on this planet than there is moose, oak trees, muscles, lichens, and mormuts. To me, this figure, this picture, this measurement is just enormous. It's astounding. I still try to wrap my head around this fact coming from the scientific idea of measuring the world piece by piece, showing a total colonization, liquidation of life that shows no science of slowing down. The physicist, Fritch of Co. Brahas, said that the solutions to the major problems of our time can be simple, but they require a radical shift in perception, in our thinking, in our values. And that quote, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society. And this is a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realization has not just yet dawned on most of our political leaders who are unable to connect the dots to use a popular phrase. End of quote. Maybe it's unfortunate, but I think this realization will not come directly to our political leaders. Political leaders, they rarely lead, they follow. So how do we make this worldview into our leading star? I think that's what I'm trying to support with this podcast, because shifting these very, very old patterns, that's really a seismic shift to our culture and it's becoming urgent. It's also important to recognize that most human cultures don't share this worldview. Indigenous peoples, regardless if they are from Australia, Alaska or the Amazon, generally share the understanding of nature as sacred as kin, as worthy of respect. Actually, they don't even use the word nature. The word nature describing all life except humans is a cultural artifact of a Western worldview. The rights of nature movement is also inspired by inform, by an offer led by Indigenous people. Since the understanding that humans are participants, not masters of the universe challenges so much of what we take for granted, it has to find some anchor point, some place from which it can start to challenge, not just our thinking, but also our collective doing, and this is where rights of nature becomes really interesting, as a legal hacking of an extractive culture of dominion. In a rights-based, liberal western society so much weight is placed on rights. As a moral understanding, but also as a legal tool, and law carries real power. Lawyer Kormak Kalinen has called law the DNA of society. Law shapes our thoughts and values are sense of right and wrong, are sense of what is important and is important. And western law has until very recently only dealt with nature as property, as object. The first scholar to describe how nature might go from legal object to legal subject was Christopher Stone, in a seminal article should trees have standing from 1972. He describes how it's really as feasible for legal frameworks to acknowledge trees as legal subjects, as it is with constructs like corporations. Nonetheless, It requires a leap of thought throughout legal history. "Each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been a bit unthinkable," he writes in the introduction of the article, "we are inclined to suppose the rightlessness of rightless things, to be a decree of nature, not the legal convention acting in support of some status quo," end of "quote." So as soon as the unthinkable part is overcome, status quo is challenged. The overtone window of possibility is widened. And when we are dealing with something as fundamental as the relationship between humans and the world, this is no small thing. This is a base for cultural transformation and very necessary cultural transformation. And the beauty of rights of nature is that it acts as a bridge between modern Western institutions shaped by and stuck in this destructive worldview and more healthy ways of being human. Rights of nature in its broader context, ecological jurisprudence, translate the sacred relationship with the living world based on ecological realities of interconnectedness between humans and nature to more than institutions of law, thereby transcending entrenched problems, positions, and past dependencies. In this podcast, we will follow some of the stories or many of how the rights of nature movement manifests throughout the world. We will hear from the mother-loving activists, lawyers, scholars, and people of all colors who defend and represent their landscapes through acknowledging them as legal subjects, valuable in their own right. We will be inspired by the deep thinking, passionate devotion and tireless action from humans who stubbornly believe in a more dignified human presence on Earth. Attention is the beginning of devotion, as poet Mary Oliver said, "Your attention is your gift to the world." This podcast, on the rights of nature, and all the amazing change makers we would meet, ask you to attend to the possibilities of organizing ourselves as humans in a very different way than we are doing right now. It helps the conviction that humans can be beautiful, creative, and beloved members of the living community, that in a time when all institutions are crumbling, we can create new ones based on what we have learned so far. On the rights of nature is hosted by me, Palatine, and produced by Friedrich Orstow, Music, Nightjar, by Cosmo Shedrake, embrace your entanglement with life, and follow the exciting development of human law aligning with the Great Law. Don't give up. Give down.