Nature as Person: Alternative Legal Framework in an Increasingly Warming and Unequal World

For centuries modernity has been put in the forefront of defining life and death and the relationships people establish with their environments. However, even this project is questioned as can be evidenced by Bruno Latour's We Have Never Been Moderns.

Modernity has glossed over other modes of relating to life, death and nonhumans by privileging a divide between humans and nonhumans. In Africa, Asia and Latin America this has been accomplished through colonization. Science, Catholicism and forced labor further solidified this dualistic approach. However, a more relational mode of framing world is still present in these areas.

In Ecuador nature is legally framed in the constitution as Pachamama in Quichua and Aimara, in New Zeland the Maori managed to get the state to recognize Whanganui river as a person, in March 2017, in the same period in India the Hindus managed to get the judges to recognize the Ganges and Yamuna rivers as legal persons. In (Southern) Africa, however, this process is still very timid. Development and growth are still the credos that African states follow, mostly for the benefit of economic and political elites.

However, the cases above show that other forms of relating to nature are possible. Laws are usually thought of as hard to change but these cases show that it is possible. However, it is a long road from making a law and changing a centuries old ideology that has framed nature as a resource.

Peoples and nations are starting to realize that the promises of progress and development modernity made cannot be delivered without further causing serious harms to people and nature. Peoples have contested this supremacy of this ideology and now earth itself is protesting - Anthropocene is now here. There is a need to rethink our terms of relating to nonhumans. This rethinking needs to happen in the ways we think and live the economy, politics, social and nature. Some countries are leading the way towards this direction.

An alternative pathway to living, dying and relating to nature is possible in the Anthropocene. This is not to deny development and growth but to redifine how these are practiced and their respective pernicious effects on indigenous people and nature. Modernity has created few rich people at the expense of billions of people and nature. This realization alone should be enough to try to embrace other modes of relationships that don't privilege an either - or approach.