The rights of nature: Dialogues between law and the arts

Over the past two decades, the relationship between nature, humans, and law has become relevant as the object of numerous studies across much of the globe. The constitutionalization of the rights of nature in Bolivia and Ecuador and the recognition of legal rights for rivers in New Zealand and India, for example, have attracted the attention of law and social science scholars in both the Global North and South. The description, analysis, and evaluation of the intertwining of nature, people, and legal systems have resulted in discourses that complement, contradict, and interact with each other. These discourses examine different aspects of the problem from diverse political, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives. Researchers in environmental law, anthropology, and sociology have analyzed how law intersects with biocentric and anthropocentric views of nature to protect or undermine ecosystems. Scholars of constitutional law, political science, and international relations have focused on the constitutionalization of plant, mineral, and animal rights in countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia, on their regulation by international law, and on the advantages and disadvantages produced by the juridification of nature. Legal theorists and political philosophers have focused on how this discourse connects modern law with usually marginalized moral, political, and legal traditions such as those of indigenous groups. Civil law researchers, property sociologists, and moral philosophers have analyzed how traditional ways of conceptualizing and regulating property are challenged by the idea that nature has rights. The diversity and richness of these political and epistemological processes are of value because of the different ways in which they contribute to understanding and critiquing the relationships between nature, human beings, and law. They are also valuable because they constitute a privileged ground to understand and question the core aspects of contemporary globalization and juridical-political pluralism.

At the same time, the relationship between human beings, law, and nature has also been a primary concern for the arts. The relationship between soundscape and the environment, trees as traces and iconography, nature as a form of knowledge—as defined in ancestral knowledge systems—and human intervention in nature, among others, are indicative of the issues and tensions at play in debates on the rights of nature. Likewise, these questions are present in various works of Inca art and Andean colonial baroque, as well as in modern and contemporary artistic expressions. The long visual tradition that embodies this theme has not been considered—necessarily—under the legal concept of the rights of nature.

This thematic issue seeks to critically examine contemporary debates around the “rights of nature” from a legal perspective and from the viewpoint of the arts. The selection of texts, images, and works of art that coexist in this thematic issue aims to highlight and juxtapose different perspectives and contexts regarding this topic. In this sense, in addition to relying on existing works in the legal field, we have bet on an innovative view to integrate the arts as sources of knowledge that can provide a new outlook for the legal conceptualization of the rights of nature. As such, this issue includes academic articles, a section with a guest artist, a series of contemporary works of art, experimental and reflexive writings, and a documentary.

Of the six articles included in the first section of this issue, two provide theoretical bases to think about the rights of nature, one deals explicitly with the connections between arts and law in rights of nature debates, and three analyze specific legal applications and contexts regarding the rights of nature. The article by Mihnea Tănăsescu, “Fuentes y bases teóricas de los derechos de la naturaleza,” introduces the theoretical framework and philosophical questions surrounding the issue of nature’s rights. Mara Tignino’s “Derechos de la naturaleza y derechos a la naturaleza: tendencias emergentes en el derecho internacional” provides a state-of-the-art analysis in the context of international environmental law. Tignino brings some of these questions to the forefront by discussing the impact of specific domestic case laws on international law while also focusing on current discussions in international law in connection to human rights. Daniel Bonilla’s “Los derechos de la naturaleza: su arquitectura conceptual” explores the conceptual categories that serve as the basis for the rights of nature while offering a bridge between these legal conceptions and their artistic counterparts in this issue. As such, Bonilla’s article provides a theoretical framework in which art pieces and literary sources—from Jewish and Christian iconographies to Walt Whitman’s poetry—serve as lenses to approach the question of nature-object and the shift towards nature-subject that appears in late modernity.

The following three articles analyze the rights of nature within specific national legal systems. Tania Luna Blanco and David de la Torre Vargas reflect on spaces within the Colombian judicial system for establishing these rights, including those opened by the Constitution of 1991, while bringing into focus current debates that coexist with what they term “fleeting emancipations.” Cletus Gregor Barié reviews the twelve years of legal interpretation since Bolivia granted collective rights to nature as “Mother Earth” in 2010. In his text titled “Doce años de soledad de los derechos de la Madre Tierra en Bolivia,” Barié points to some of the tensions and difficulties in its application while proposing ways in which to learn from the Bolivian case. Finally, Sören Koch, Esmeralda Colombo, and Catalina Vallejo Piedrahíta discuss reluctancy towards the recognition of the rights of nature in Norwegian law while exploring the alternative of legal duties towards nature, as well as how the indigenous rights of the Sámi may offer some foundation.

The second section—Dialogues—brings together art pieces, documents, experimental writings, and responses by legal scholars to works of art. Divided into three parts—a guest artist, a subsection on dialogues between law and the arts, and another subsection on documents and reflections—Dialogues highlights a variety of angles and approaches to the role of the arts in discussing the legal rights of nature. The first part opens with the invited artist, Diego Samper, a Colombian artist residing in Canada who explores interdisciplinary connections between biology, anthropology, natural history, and indigenous cultures. Three of his works—which include photography, video, and a musical piece—are displayed, together with a text written by him.

A curated section titled “Dialogues between law and the arts” follows, which includes works and texts by four contemporary Colombian artists—Eulalia de Valdenebro, María Margarita Jiménez, María Elvira Escallón, and Miler Lagos—known for their ongoing dialogues with nature as a subject, together with short, intuitive responses by legal scholars invited to react to specific works of these artists. A piece co-written by artist and critic Lucas Ospina, together with Manuel Iturralde, a legal scholar who studies the connections between law and cinema, brings to the front an experimental approach, as well as an orchestrated dialogue around four works: “Lifeline” by Canadian multimedia artist Peter von Tiesenhausen; the painting “Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!)” from 1891 by Henri Rousseau, the French naïf artist also known as “le Douanier Rousseau”; the science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961), and “The Weather Project,” an installation by Danish artist Ólafur Elíasson shown at the Tate Modern, London, in 2003.

The third and closing part, “Documents and reflections,” includes a documentary by Michael Riegner and Cecilia Oliveira, titled “Jatun Yacu – Amazon of Rights,” which refers to the indigenous name in Quechua of a part of the Amazon River passing through Ecuador. Based on interviews and images of the Amazon, combined with indigenous music and poetry, the documentary explores the shifting movements of the river through the national borders of Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, where it encounters different legal systems that change its status at each national frontier. The piece is accompanied by a written text by Riegner and Oliveira, where they discuss its production and reflect on documentary films and visual ethnography as alternative tools to research legal subjects. The section closes with “Nace un movimiento,” a text by Mari Margil, a renowned activist with a prominent role in recognizing the rights of nature in the United States and in the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008. In her text, Margil documents the development of the rights of nature movement in the United States while reflecting on some of the issues at stake that translate into tensions between state legislatures, corporate interests, and local communities.

We hope this thematic issue allows for new connections—between nature, humans, and law, between Global North and Global South, between legal and artistic analysis and artistic interpretation—and thereby prompts new insights into ways of understanding and protecting the world in which all this lives together.