Common Rights: Humans as Nature, Nature as Human

Humans as Nature: geo­lo­gical forces

In an art­icle pub­lished in Nature in 2002, Nobel win­ner chem­ist Paul J. Crutzen had argued that, given the unpre­ced­en­ted effects of human activ­it­ies on the global envir­on­ment, the planet has entered into a new geo­lo­gical era, which he pro­poses to call Anthropocene[1]. Accord­ing to him, since indus­tri­al­iz­a­tion gained steam power in late 18^th cen­tury, the Holo­cene epoch, a twelve-​thousand year period of rel­at­ive stable cli­mate that allowed agri­cul­ture and urban civil­iz­a­tions to flour­ish, was about to give space to a new age in plan­et­ary evol­u­tion that is dis­tin­guished by the his­tor­ical fact that human­ity have turned out to be the equi­val­ent of a nat­ural force which is now determ­in­ant to global eco­lo­gical pro­cesses. In other words, in the last two hun­dred years, both human­ity and the planet, sim­ul­tan­eously, have entered into a period of rad­ical and inter­de­pend­ent trans­form­a­tions, to the extent that the divi­sions that once sep­ar­ated his­tory and nature have col­lapsed. Cul­ture thus turns into a nat­ural force, and nat­ural vari­ations are now part of human history.

In 1990, with the pub­lic­a­tion of The Nat­ural Con­tract, Michel Serres was already anti­cip­at­ing the con­sequences of this new socio-​geological order we have cre­ated. As he wrote, human­ity has became “phys­ical act­ors in the phys­ical sys­tems of the Earth”[2], and there­fore, it was neces­sary to ima­gine new forms of rela­tion between humans and nature that would re-​define the ways in which mod­ern soci­et­ies and mod­ern sci­ences have con­cep­tu­al­ized the nat­ural world. For Serres, nature could no longer be under­stood as inert resource mater­i­als avail­able for lim­it­less appro­pri­ation. Instead, eco­sys­tems should be con­cep­tu­al­ized as liv­ing and vibrant agents with which humans were co-​existing in con­stant and del­ic­ate inter­ac­tions. The neces­sary trans­form­a­tions were at the same time epi­stemic and legal, philo­soph­ical and polit­ical. Ceas­ing to be pass­ive objects, non-​humans should be included inside a new form of social con­tract that would encom­pass all those things we have left out­side our defin­i­tions of the social. The nat­ural con­tract advoc­ates for a new legal-​ecology that Serres calls “rights of sym­bi­osis”, a political-​epistemic frame in which humans and non-​humans share a com­mon legal status. “Rights of sym­bi­osis are defined by reci­pro­city: how­ever much nature gives man, man must give that much back to nature, now a legal subject”[3]. As his­tory has made humans equi­val­ent to nat­ural forces, reversely, nature should be endowed with the same rights as the ones conquered by humans along history.

Nature as Human: legal rights

Michel Serres philo­soph­ical spec­u­la­tions gained a real dimen­sion in 2008, when Ecuador adop­ted a new con­sti­tu­tion in which nature is gran­ted inali­en­able rights[4]. Along­side the fun­da­mental rights attrib­uted to the cit­izens of the State of Ecuador, the con­sti­tu­tion estab­lishes fun­da­mental rights to nat­ural com­munit­ies and eco-​systems, inscrib­ing nature as a sub­ject of the national legal code. The inter­est­ing aspect intro­duced by this law could be read as a way of address­ing a ques­tion presen­ted by philo­sopher Etienne Balibar in his crit­ical ana­lysis of human-​rights: -“the use of nature is sub­mit­ted by prac­tic­ally no law”[5], he writes, and inso­far as prop­erty is con­ceived as an uni­ver­sal right accord­ing to human-​rights legis­la­tion, and moreover, inso­far as nature is the prim­or­dial object of prop­erty, for Balibar it was a ques­tion of intro­du­cing a way of pro­tect­ing the right of col­lect­ives to access and use nat­ural ele­ments that, although essen­tial and com­mon to all human life, were run­ning the risk of being con­ver­ted into ali­en­able, com­mod­it­ized, and privat­ized objects. Much of the cur­rent debate in dif­fer­ent polit­ical for­ums, most not­ably the United Nations, around the “right to water” or “right to envir­on­ment”, for example, are the prac­tical mani­fest­a­tions of attempts to over­come that para­dox by draw­ing new forms of reg­u­lat­ing vital com­mon resources.

But the answer given to this political-​legal flaw iden­ti­fied by the philo­sopher at the core of human rights legis­la­tion through the Rights of Nature destabil­izes the cur­rent com­mon sense. The anim­ist con­cep­tion of the law, for which ele­ments such as birds, moun­tains, rocks, river deltas, and so on, are gran­ted rights as if they were humans, implies both a legal and an epi­stemic shift. Because being attrib­uted with defin­i­tions ordin­ar­ily bond to cit­izen­ship, non-​human nat­ural com­munit­ies aban­don the status of prop­erty – even of “com­mon property” – to become bearing-​rights entit­ies. At the same time, nature ceases to be framed as an object of which forms of pos­ses­sion and use should be reg­u­lated by gov­ern­ment in order to be presen­ted as a form-​of-​life which right to exist­ence should be guar­an­teed and pro­tect by the State.

Etienne Balibar’s own answers are some­how lim­ited in this point, for even identi­fy­ing in eco­logy a cru­cial point for re-​considering the polit­ics of human rights, he only under­scores the import­ance of the “uni­ver­sal­iz­a­tion of prop­erty” bey­ond col­lect­ive and private delim­it­a­tion. He calls for a form of prop­erty without a sub­ject– “a fic­tional sub­ject rep­res­en­ted by all human kind”. Yet what is cru­cial in rela­tion to the Rights of Nature is that the “fun­da­mental prop­erty” of all human beings is truly uni­ver­sal­ized by the fact that is ceases to be a prop­erty, inso­far as Nature becomes an “uni­ver­sal sub­ject” her­self. The polit­ics of rights implied here is drawn from the right of rather than the right to the envir­on­ment. Not the rights that attempt to grant equal and just pos­ses­sion of nature, but the rights that nature itself pos­sesses. To put it dif­fer­ently: the polit­ical prob­lem of the com­mons is not addressed by pro­tect­ing and reg­u­lat­ing col­lect­ive or uni­ver­sal appro­pri­ation, but to the con­trary, by ques­tion­ing the very idea of appro­pri­ation that comes together with the concept of prop­erty, even if prop­erty becomes uni­ver­sal or com­mon. Not only a legal frame drawn around an uni­ver­sal sub­ject to define what a com­mon should be, but a rad­ical uni­ver­sal­iz­a­tion of the idea of the sub­ject estab­lished through the defin­i­tion of human and non-​human com­mon rights.

Paulo Tav­ares, Dec. 2010 | first pub­lished in italian here.

Mara-​Stream

[1] Paul Cruzten and Eugene F. Sto­er­mer, The Anthro­po­cene, IGPB [ Inter­na­tional GEosphere-​Biosphere Pro­gramme] News­let­ter 41, 2000

[2] Michel Serres, The nat­ural con­tract, 1990, p. 18

[3] op cit., 38.

[4] “Art. Rights Enti­tle­ment: Per­sons and people have the fun­da­mental rights guar­an­teed in this Con­sti­tu­tion and in the inter­na­tional human rights instru­ments. Nature is sub­ject to those rights given by this Con­sti­tu­tion and Law. Chapter: Rights for Nature: Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is repro­duced and exists, has the right to exist, per­sist, main­tain itself and regen­er­ate its own vital cycles, struc­ture, func­tions and its evol­u­tion­ary processes.”

[5] Etienne Balibar, 1994 – “What is a Polit­ics of the Rights of Man?”

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