Twenty-One - Rights of Nature

Summary

The most disastrous blunder of the age was its refusal to acknowledge what most subalternised cultures and people took for granted: nature does not belong to us; we belong to nature. The reckless destruction of nature ended up threatening the survival of the human species, in the form of recurrent pandemics, extreme weather events, massive numbers of environment refugees, the disappearance of small island states, and environment-related chronic diseases. I argue in this chapter that all the main mechanisms of exclusion and discrimination at work in modern societies – whether class, race or gender – are traceable to the root dualisms between humanity and nature, and between mind/soul and body. The ways in which modern society deals with inferiority are modelled on the ways it deals with nature. If abyssal exclusion means domination by appropriation/violence, nature – including land, rivers and forests as well as people and ways of being and living whose humanity was negated precisely for being part of nature – has been the favoured target of this domination in Western modernity since the sixteenth century. I start by examining old and new contestations of Cartesian dualism, then I illustrate how this contestation has entered the field of law, what it entails and the prospects for the future. The rights of nature are a promising real legal utopia.