Rights of Nature

For our last IENK topic, we focused on the rights of nature within the New Zealand context while spending our last two weeks of the semester there. This particular concept of nature and animals having rights is fairly new to me, I’ve never thought about the process of law reaching beyond the human realm. I assume a lot of that has to do with the society I grew up with and around, stemming from Western beliefs in the separation between human and nature. This dualism has stuck with me since learning about eco feminism and has been playing a huge part in my learning and understanding process since. Within the first reading and the thought of “humanity as the centre of existence” (Burdon, 2009), humans again place themselves above what gives them life and substance to continue living. The hyper-separation continues to drive countries and societies with these Western beliefs towards a future of destruction of the environment around them. These harmful environmental ideals and way of thinking lead to the laws that are then formed. Within the Maori communities that we visited, their values stem from their deep and intimate connection with land and river, which then flow into their treatment of such. Their priority is in maintaining the land and river to be heathy and cared for, they take it as their responsibility and this gives them connection to their culture.

The second reading discusses laws of man and how, “communities have always used laws to express the ideals to which they aspire and to regulate how power is exercised” (Cullinan, 2008). If the environment is not one of the top priorities of a community, there will be little regulation as to what happens to the environment. If the people in power do not recognize negative behaviours affecting the world around them, there will be no change within the policy or decision making process. Yet, for those communities that support a surviving and flourishing environment will treat the environment with respect. This is the case in the Maori communities, working towards and achieving the Whanganui River to be seen as a person and receive the same rights as a person would. This is the among the first steps to changing the way the population sees nature, and places it on the same level as humans, connecting us once again.

One thing that keeps many from connecting to land is the idea of private poverty and ownership. I have grown up without questioning the buying and selling of land, it was always the same as buying and selling a car. Then, throughout my global experience I began to understand the corruption that follows the transaction of land, especially when it was land that was invaded and taken from the original inhabitants to begin with. The ownership of land places humans again on top of the pyramid, again forgetting that the land provides for us and without it, we would not survive. In the process that we treat the land, I remember the performance by the Earth group for our IENK presentations and how they re-enacted the giving tree story. We continue to take and take from what we think we own, and never give back, slowly killing it and not realizing we are dependent on earth and the resources we retrieve from it. The separation we create allows people to not see the environment needs protection from us.

Burdon, P. (2009). Wild law: The philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. Retrieved from http://ssm.com/abstract=1636564

Cullinan, C. (2008, January 2). If Nature Had Rights. Orion Magazine. Retrieved from https://orionmagazine.org:443/article/if-nature-had-rights/; accessed January 20^th, 2015.