Rights of nature, human species identity, and political thought in the anthropocene

Abstract

While much has been written about the efforts in multiple jurisdictions to recognize nature and natural features as rightsholders, there has been relatively little research into the relationship of these Rights of Nature developments to the Anthropocene. This article uses historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument for the adoption of a human species identity in the Anthropocene as a jumping off point to analyze how legal rights for nature, such as those enacted in the Ecuador and New Zealand, can help address what Chakrabarty identifies as the challenges the Anthropocene presents to contemporary political thought. These pressing challenges include how to politicize relations between humans and non-humans, extend justice and the sphere of human morality to non-humans, cope with human limitations on our abilities to represent non-humans, and to initiate a withdrawal from a human-dominated world that is a common though uneven legacy of imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. The article argues that by providing responses to these challenges, Rights of Nature laws may also further the development of a human species identity. However, it also qualifies this conclusion in several important regards. First, the more expansive of these protections, embracing all of nature within political boundaries and relying on a remedial approach to justice and broad notions of representation in fact may hinder the adoption of the kind of species identity for which Chakrabarty has called. Second, as a cosmopolitan identity, this identity may be inhibited by continued circumscription of Rights of Nature by notions of state sovereignty.