4 - Losing the Trees for the Forest

Summary

This chapter considers how, with animals recognised as a part of nature, legally enshrined ‘rights of nature’ could provide a basis for animals’ legal subjecthood. The chapter centres on the case of Estrellita, an Ecuadorean woolly monkey who was declared to be a subject of rights under Ecuador’s constitutionally enshrined rights of ‘pachamama’ or ‘Mother Earth’. Yet, while Estrellita’s case highlights the potential for rights of nature to serve as a source of animals’ legal subjectivity, the chapter stresses caution. First, several rights-of-nature provisions have arguably co-opted Indigenous ideas, and served to justify continued resource extraction under the guise of living in balance with nature. Second, rights-of-nature provisions maintain the ontological human/all-other-nature divide that exists in current legal systems. Finally, the rights of nature may operate as a kind of ‘eco-coverture’ by encapsulating the interests of individual animals within the sphere of nature’s interests, thereby limiting the potential scope of animals’ legal protection. The chapter concludes that we can do better than grounding animals’ legal subjecthood in the rights of nature.