Session
1

What is Rights of Nature?

How are Rights for Nature laws manifesting globally?

What is Nature?

Earth Centred Law is one of the many 'threads' within the weave of Earth Jurisprudence.

Earth jurisprudence - also known as 'Earth Laws' or 'Wild Law', is a term coined by Thomas Berry (The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future). Earth jurisprudence accepts that humans and nature are deeply intertwined and connected (as our First Nations communities have always known).

Earth Jurisprudence promotes a number of key principles including:
- the intrinsic right of nature to exist, persist and evolve
- the need to create governance structures that enable human societies to fit within our ecological limits
-the benefits of engaging with culturally diverse governance structures, including indigenous knowledge systems (sourced from the AELA website).

Giving Nature Personhood has limitations to protecting life into the future, as it remains stuck within the western system of human law, and as we know, not all humans nor animals are treated equally.
Instead, we, as humans need to find alternative laws and ethics that support living life,
and here is where Earth Jurisprudence comes in.
The Earth is a living entity, and deserves rights to exist, persist and thrive.
Rights of Nature may emerge as Water Rights or Mountain Rights, which acknowledge these complex ecosystems as beings with their own agency.

In preparation for connecting up with your group we ask that you set aside
10 minutes, just prior to the session, to re-tool your inner climate with this 6 minute
AUDIO MEDITATION
produced and designed by Pejk Malinovski

Headphones recommended.
Sit or lie comfortably, arms and legs uncrossed.
DEAR CLIMATE /// HERB MEDITATION








source: https://www.dearclimate.net/audio
Shared under the 'attribution/noncommercial/no derivatives.'

Activities

Watch a flower for ten minutes on a sunny still day. What do you notice? Does the flower have visitors?

Have a conversation with a rock about time.
Prompt questions: Have you always been here? How old are you? Did you come from a volcano? Have you seen a dinosaur? Were you always this size? Is it true that a rolling stone gathers no moss?

Recommended Reading

Podcasts & Videos

The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement - 1 hr Feature Documentary

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuFNmH7lVTA

Why doesn't nature exist? - 5 min video
unpacking the nature/culture binary through the Romantics, Slavoj Žižek and Dark Ecology

source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwUlpBGN6hE

Short written pieces







Aileen Moreton Robinson White Possession and Indigenous Sovereignty Matters
Read the whole or part [pages 11-14] of the introduction
here

Link below to Thomas Berrys' Ten Principals of Earth Jurisprudence
https://therightsofnature.org/thomas-berrys-ten-principles-of-jurisprudence/


Link below to this short guardian article by Jane Gleeson-White explores River Rights in Australia
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/01/its-only-natural-the-push-to-give-rivers-mountains-and-forests-legal-rights

Further materials

If you have time for some deeper context : additionally read these following articles...

Christopher D.Stone Should Trees Have Standing?

Sylvie Pouteau Beyond ‘‘Second Animals’’: Making Sense of Plant Ethics

Cormac Cullinan If Nature Had Rights, What would we have to give up?
https://orionmagazine.org/article/if-nature-had-rights/

Timothy Morton Ecology without Nature
http://lab.cccb.org/en/tim-morton-ecology-without-nature/

Mumta Ito: Nature's rights: a new paradigm for environmental protection
https://theecologist.org/2017/may/09/natures-rights-new-paradigm-environmental-protection

We've put together a document to support hosting your group conversations
you can access it
here



Prompt questions

What is 'nature'?

Can we really ever own 'nature'?

What is Earth Jurisprudence in your opinion?

How does viewing 'nature' or a river as a living thing with its own intrinsic rights alter how we perceive them, and how could this be useful to ensure their protection?

What role does consumer capitalism plays in nature disturbance?

Is there an alternative to industrial consumerism?

'ecological awareness means realising that beings are interconnected in some way, but then we have to figure out what this interconnection actually means. At the moment, the phrase I’m using for the thing that ecological awareness names is “the symbiotic real”. What do I mean by that? I mean that ecological relationships are best described in terms of symbiosis, and symbiosis is a very interesting thing because it’s always a sort of fragile, contingent, uneasy relationship in which it’s impossible to determine which entity is the top entity. '

Timothy Morton

'Owning property, becoming propertyless, and being property. These three
categories of proprietaryness are born of the episteme of Western culture,
which has made manifest the existence of order
functioning through the logic of possession.'

PROGRAM

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