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Ecuador’s cloud forest has legal rights – and maybe a song credit

Pabio November 4, 2024

A cloud forest in Ecuador could be credited as its perpetrator: the latest development in a growing global movement to grant legal rights to nature. The More-Than-Human-Life (Moth) Project, an initiative that works to advance non-human rights, has petitioned EcuadorThe copyright office recognizes Los Cedros Forest as co-creator of a song composed there. The NYU School of Law-based group’s decision is the world’s first legal attempt to “recognize an ecosystem’s moral authorship of a work of art,” it said. The guardian.

The song, which includes sounds of bats, monkeys and leaves recorded at Los Cedros, was “written with the forest”, said writer Robert Macfarlane, who organized the expedition for his upcoming book on the forest. nature rights movement. “We were briefly part of this permanent being of the forest, and we couldn’t have written it without the forest.”

The Los Cedros reserve in the northwest Andes is home to a “large” number of species, said The future of the BBC. From jaguars and bears to 400 species of birds, the biodiversity is “astonishing”. Most of the reserve is in a “cloud forest”, where “the air is heavy with humidity from torrential rains and constant condensation”. Despite “significant deforestation” in the surrounding area, the nearly 12,000 acres of forest “are buzzing with life.”

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But this is largely due to a “powerful and increasingly influential global legal movement” that began in the 1990s. In 2008, lobbying by indigenous groups led Ecuador to adopt a new constitution that enshrines the rights of Pacha Mama (Mother Nature). It became the first country in the world to declare that nature had the same rights as humans: one of the first “major steps” in the movement for the rights of nature.

The idea is rooted in a “common indigenous belief”, said Yes Magazine: that nature, from the Andean mountains to a “single soldier ant,” is a living system with which humans must “coexist harmoniously.” Conservation efforts hit a “major stumbling block” in 2017, when Ecuador granted the state mining company concessions in most of Los Cedros. After a long legal battle, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled in 2021 to revoke mining permits and grant Los Cedros legal personality: a world first, transforming the rights of nature from a “theoretical constitutional text into a tangible and concrete policy”.

Thanks to this “historic” decision, Los Cedros remained a “sanctuary,” said a Moth Project report published in June. Such decisions “can be effective tools to protect endangered ecosystems” – but they are “not sufficient” on their own to protect threats to the “more-than-human world”. Since his election last year, the Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa is “aggressively” seeking to invest in the country’s mining sector, presenting it as a way to create jobs in a country “ravaged by criminal activity” And drug traffickingsaid Inside climate news.

Nevertheless, “no other nation has come close to Ecuador’s growing jurisprudence on the issue.” In two referendums last year, voters chose to block mining in another cloud forest and halt oil production in part of the region. Amazon rainforest. “We now have a whole generation of young people who have grown up knowing that nature has rights,” said Ecuadorian political scientist and environmental activist Natalia Greene. “The law has influenced people’s understanding of nature and that’s very powerful.”

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