Contestable Earth: On the Earth Community and the Rights of Nature Movement

• In Event: Reimagining Virtue, Rights, and Masculinity in Environmental Political Theory

Abstract

Facing the convergent crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, scholars have increasingly leveled the charge of anthropocentrism at political theorizing that centers the human subject. In response, thinkers from a variety of traditions have decentered the rational human subject as the only subject of democratic politics by expanding narrow accounts of agency, freedom, and political participation. While this scholarship has provided a direct challenge to the anthropocentrism of political theory, it has not been as attentive to the ontological imaginaries and ethical values that sustain and orient democratic politics. Following up on this relative neglect, this paper argues that ontological figurations of Earth and their relation to ecocentric ethical values are indispensable to political theorizing in the face of the planetary ecological crisis and the challenge it poses to democratic norms, practices, and institutions. More specifically, this paper investigates the dynamic and recursive relationship between ontological figurations of Earth, ecocentric ethical values, and political contestation through an engagement with Thomas Berry’s figuration of the Earth community and its articulation in and through the Rights of Nature movement.

The Rights of Nature Movement, following the adoption of initial rights of nature legal provisions in the U.S, Ecuador, Bolivia, and New Zealand in the early 2000s, has developed increasingly dense transnational networks to promote the rights of nature and connect community rights, indigenous, and environmentalist groups across the Global North and South. Concurrently, the ecocentric natural law philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence has been established to both provide an interpretive frame for coherently understanding the Rights of Nature movement and normative orientation for the implementation of legal provisions that recognize nature’s rights. Central to Earth Jurisprudence is the concept of the Earth community, initially developed by Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest and self-styled “geologian” (or geological theologian). On the Earth Jurisprudential reading of the Earth community, this account of Earth serves as the basis for the higher law within which human law is embedded and derives its authority. However, in this paper, I argue that Berry’s account of the Earth community is an ontological figuration of Earth that is more contestable than the Earth Jurisprudential formulation of the Earth community assumes.

My reading of Berry’s Earth community, focusing on his ecological works, is through the lens of Stephen K. White’s distinction between strong and weak ontological approaches to political theory where strong ontological approaches that, for example, rely on accounts of God or human nature, are characterized by a certitude in the move from the ontological to the ethical and political. Conversely, weak ontological approaches accept the necessity of having fundamental conceptualizations of self, other, and world for orienting the ethical and political while simultaneously acknowledging that these foundations are always contestable. Drawing on this account of weak ontology, I read the Earth community as a weak ontological figuration of Earth that is only fully articulated as weakly ontological in and through the political contestation of the Rights of Nature movement. To substantiate this reading, I look at the work of transnational organizations such as the Earth Law Center, the Gaia Foundation, and the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature as well as the UN Harmony of Nature programme and the proposed Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Nature, which was drafted and adopted at the People’s Climate Conference in Bolivia in 2010.

Over the course of the paper, the dynamic quality of the relationship between ontological figuration, ethical values, and political contestation is demonstrated through a careful tracing of the series of recursive relations of articulation and rearticulation between them. While I draw on the weak ontological approach to political theorizing in this paper, my argument extends this approach by incorporating insights from theories of agonistic democracy. It does so by integrating an understanding of the centrality of political contestation to the ontological understandings of the self, other, and world while staying attentive to the remainders of democratic politics. In this way, this paper hopes to contribute to post-anthropocentric political theorizing by cultivating attentiveness to the ontological imaginaries and ethical values that sustain and orient democratic politics while always already being sites of ongoing political contestation themselves.

Author

• Sjors Verhaak, Cornell University