MOTH has already published a book promoting the idea that all of nature has rights and that the age of ‘human supremacism’ must end.
How radical are our leading law schools becoming? I wrote recently that Harvard Law School and Harvard University are instituting a class that will teach nature rights. Well, it’s way behind New York University’s School of Law, which recently launched and sponsors the MOTH project — “more than human life” — an initiative of the TERRA (The Earth Rights Research and Action) Program that pushes the nature-rights paradigm toward societal dominance.
MOTH has already published a book — More Than Human Rights — promoting the idea that all of nature has rights and that the age of “human supremacism” must end. This is made clear by the founder of the project, César Rodríguez-Garavito, a NYU law professor whose “current scholarship and legal practice focus on the intersection of climate change, biodiversity, rights of nature and human rights.” He writes in the book’s introduction:
I had founded the initiative that inspired this book, which I called the More-Than-Human Rights (MOTH) Project. Co-organized with colleagues at New York University’s School of Law, the MOTH Project brings together lawyers, scientists, Indigenous leaders, artists, writers, advocates, judges, journalists, philosophers, and other thinkers and doers from around the world who work together to advance ideas and practices that support the rights and well-being of nonhumans.
The movement is steeped in neo-paganism — also made vividly clear in Rodríguez-Garavito’s introduction:
Don Sabino did not speak of rights, but of life. “The forest is alive, there are spirits in the forest, they are the real rulers of the forest,” he told me in a voice so quiet that it felt like an invitation to listen intently to the sounds all around us. . . . If the forest is alive—if the animals, the plants, the fungi, the river, the air, and the rocks are all animate beings—then we need to find ways to hear their voices and spirits.
One of the chapters pursues this paganistic idea in more depth, “The Jungle is a Living, Intelligent, and Conscious Being,” in which the former president of the Sarayaku Governing Council urges us all to see nature as a living entity (an idea that has also been promoted in the New York Times):
What we propose to humanity, to citizens, is to understand that we are nature—nature itself is alive and is part of us, and we are part of it. Everything we call nature, the lagoons, the trees, the marshes, the dens and burrows, everything is interconnected. And we are interconnected, our ancestors, our parents, our
grandparents—we are all interconnected. This is the kawsak sacha—it is the jungle, the forest that is alive . . .We seek the recognition of the territory as a living, conscious, and intelligent being. We are looking for a special title—something that represents to us that this territory is sacred, where there is life, where there are lagoons, waterfalls, mountains, marshes, and huge trees, and where we coexist with protective beings.
This recognition of the living forest is truly the space that guarantees the intrinsic relationship we have with the non-visible world that, in our philosophy and worldview, is living territory.
I am the last person to criticize someone’s religious faith. But this isn’t science. It is neo-pagan mysticism, and that spirit permeates the nature-rights movement, of which MOTH is a part.
MOTH also disdains capitalism. The authors of the chapter, “Recasting Interspecies Care and Solidarity as Emergent Anti-Capitalist Politics,” decry capitalism as a “colonialist” evil and even lament normal development as causing the loss of animals’ lives during the “Black Summer” fires in Australia:
Wild animals confronted with catastrophic fires had already long faced the transformation—destruction, fragmentation, and damage—of their habitat, including fences, roads, and other human infrastructure cutting across their territories.
And, of course, the main enemy is the hated capitalism:
It is now well documented that while bushfires are intrinsic to Australian ecosystems, the intensity and scale of the 2019–2020 fires were the outcome of a range of human interventions, as was the mass killing of animals and the destruction of ecosystems. The most obvious contributor was anthropogenic climate change, driven by extracting and burning fossil fuel, massive deforestation, and industrial-scale animal agriculture, all of which the Australian colonial-capitalist state has excelled at creating permissive conditions for, and sustaining . . .
The intensity and range of the fires were a product of capitalism and colonialism, and responsibility for them lies with the people who have driven and benefited from these organizations of life.
I have long thought that these nature-rights radicals are neurotically anti-modern and neo-pagan. MOTH provides more evidence supporting my hypothesis.
But nature-rights activists never grapple intellectually with the fact that we no longer live in a world populated primarily by small tribes whose members, they fail to mention, often lived short and difficult lives. Today — cold, hard fact — we must feed, house, and otherwise care for billions of people.
A nature-rights paradigm will make that impossible by hobbling our ability to make proper and responsible use of natural resources for human benefit. Contrary to MOTH’s beliefs, the best approach to promoting both human thriving and responsible environmentalism is properly regulated capitalism that incentivizes the innovation and creates the wealth necessary to institute improved ecological practices that make for a cleaner world.