Beyond the Human-Nature Divide: The Rights of Nature and Political Membership

• In Event: Climate Wreckage and Indigenous Philosophies

Abstract

In 2008, the country of Ecuador updated its constitution and became the first country to recognize rights of nature. Inspired by the indigenous Andean cosmovision of sumak kawsay, the Ecuadorian preamble posits nature as belonging to the nation’s identity and entitled to constitutional protection. These rights have been inspired by the principle of buen vivir, a Spanish translation of the Quechua sumak kawsay. Drawing on indigenous political thought, anticolonial thought, and ecological thought, buen vivir can be thought of as a form of “good living” that envisions distinct, ordered relations between humans and nature. Maria Fernanda Enriquez Szentkiralyi has argued that rights of nature discourses in Ecuador, and Latin American political thought more generally, were devised along three framings, namely through economics, law, and ethics. My paper considers the normative implications the rights of nature raise for political membership, specifically through the lens of constitutional design. I argue that the inclusion of nature, or nonhuman life, into a political community can be grounded in an idea I call “passive citizenship.” Drawing on emerging discussions in the literature on new animism, I show how passive citizenship can serve as a justification for including nature into a political community. Rights of nature shift constitutional design from anthropocentric to ecocentric and therefore have the power to expand traditional categories of political membership to include nonhuman life.

Author

• Joseph Rodriguez, Duke University