Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: This is what happens when you combine the movies “The Andromeda Strain” and “Silent Running” with NASA Super Intelligent Chimps from “The Simpsons” and, of course, lawyers.
First, a little space exploration history:
Carrying on…
The idea of “Nature Rights” is being extended to not just Earth’s ecosystems, but to those of space:
“Christopher Stone’s pioneering 1972 paper “Should Trees Have Standing?” proposed legal rights and standing for the environment under a guardianship model. In the decades since, the growing Rights of Nature movement has demonstrated the prescience of Stone’s ideas. As humanity ventures into a new era of growing astrobiological research, and with increasing interest in commercial space development, the time is right to reimagine legal frameworks to acknowledge and safeguard the rights of extraterrestrial ecosystems. Building on Stone’s argument, we propose that the legal system should recognise the interests of extraterrestrial life and its environments in line with his guardianship model. Several ways in which current law can be made to accommodate such recognition are suggested, for example through existing doctrines of international environmental law, including the ecosystems approach used in the Convention on Biodiversity. We examine the efficacy of the Rights of Nature movement and its role in promoting legal guardianship models to protect nature’s interests, and call for engagement of environmental groups with key space governance bodies such as the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCOPUOS) or the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR). We conclude that shifting the focus of current law and governance from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective will allow non-human interests to gain voice in decision making, expanding Stone’s circle of rights beyond Earth.”
The full article in the journal Space Policy can be found here.
Soon, those small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a Pict will have just as much right to the resulting groove as the Pict:
“Humans benefit enormously—materially, culturally, intellectually—from the more-than-human world. Indeed, many of humanity’s finest achievements would be unthinkable without nature—from the development of modern medicines to aviation to clothing design and beyond. And, yet—partly flowing from the distinction drawn between nature and culture—law, governance, and corporate practices rarely recognize the key role played by the living world and its many beings. What would better practices look like? How can humans and human organizations embed reciprocity with the more-than-human world into their laws, rules, and operating principles?
“The MOTH Program develops answers to these questions through the actions it takes in collaboration with partners.
“One such effort is the Song of the Cedars, a song that was collaboratively created by four humans—the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, the writer Robert Macfarlane, the legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, and the mycologist Giuliana Furci—and a cloud forest, namely the Los Cedros Forest in Ecuador. With the crucial assistance of the Ecuadorian organization Celid Plural, a legal petition was filed with the Ecuadorian copyright office, seeking to have the Los Cedros Forest recognized as an author of the Song of the Cedars along with the four human authors.
“The aim of the song and its accompanying legal petition is to recognize—legally and culturally—the inextricable agency and participation of the natural world in the making of art. The song could not have been made without Los Cedros, legally and philosophically justifying the effort to acknowledge the forest’s “moral authorship” in the song’s creation. Moreover, the hope is that pushing for recognition of Los Cedros’ authorship will trigger a change in the profoundly anthropocentric realm of copyright law.”
Chimpanzees aren’t human and therefore don’t have human rights. The humans at the “Nonhuman Rights Project” are angry that a court pointed out this obvious fact:
“The Nonhuman Rights Project is deeply troubled that the Michigan Court of Appeals declined to protect autonomy—a supreme value under Michigan law—when the autonomous beings are chimpanzees. While the decision properly treated the issue of nonhuman eligibility for habeas corpus relief as one for judges to consider under the common law, the Court of Appeals held that it was bound by 19th-century Michigan Supreme Court precedent treating animals as mere property. The Nonhuman Rights Project will ask the Michigan Supreme Court to reject this outdated classification. The chimpanzees confined in the DeYoung Family Zoo deserve the law’s protection because they are autonomous beings whose suffering matters.”
TTFN.
