In recent decades, environment campaigners have begun to attribute legal personhood and rights to both living and non-living things. For example, Wesley J. Smith wrote recently about Harvard Law and New York University Law’s moves in this area, likely to lead to some high-powered litigation.

For example, a recent downloadable book by the MOTH (More Than Human Life) project seeks “human rights without human supremacism.”

Edited by César Rodríguez-Garavito, a “driving force in human rights litigation by young people in which courts in several countries have ordered speedier action to reduce future climate change risks,” it features chapters like “’The Jungle Is a Living, Intelligent and Conscious Being’: A Conversation” and “Can the Rights of Nature Transform the Way Rights Are Conceptualized in International Law?”

Smith comments,

The movement is steeped in neo-paganism — also made vividly clear in Rodríguez-Garavito’s introduction: “Don Sabino did not speak of rights, but of life. “The forest is alive, there are spirits in the forest, they are the real rulers of the forest,” he told me in a voice so quiet that it felt like an invitation to listen intently to the sounds all around us. . . . If the forest is alive — if the animals, the plants, the fungi, the river, the air, and the rocks are all animate beings—then we need to find ways to hear their voices and spirits.”

WESLEY J. SMITH, “NYU LAW PUSHES MOTH — ‘MORE THAN HUMAN’ LIFE PROJECT,” NATIONAL REVIEW, JULY 10, 2024

Well yes, it’s a nod to neo-paganism. But wait. 

We’ve Been Hearing This Sort of Thing from the Sciences, Too

A prominent chemist tells us that all life forms are conscious. A Cornell plant scientist tells us that goldenrods are intelligent. A cutting-edge biochemist tells us that all living cells are cognitive.

As science goes panpsychist, a war on human rights, as traditionally understood, will be a direction for which law schools will provide the muscle. Neo-paganism will provide the artwork — don’t underestimate the importance of that. Emotionally appealing artistic elements dull the attention and soften the blow.

Smith protests, “I am the last person to criticize someone’s religious faith. But this isn’t science. It is neo-pagan mysticism, and that spirit permeates the nature-rights movement, of which MOTH is a part.” 

But what if it is both? That is, panpsychism is the science, neo-paganism is the religion, and human rights are the sacrificial offering.

Along those lines, a current MOTH project is quite revealing:

MOTH attorneys currently seek to argue before an Ecuadorian judge that a song by British musician Cosmo Sheldrake that features sounds of birds, animals and wind noises recorded at Los Cedros should be copyrighted as a joint creation of human and non-human entities.

Rodríguez-Garavito “intends to set a legal precedent by establishing the creative rights of the Los Cedros cloud forest in northern Ecuador, which has already been recognised as an entity possessing legal personhood and rights under a landmark 2021 judgment by the constitutional court of Ecuador,” the Guardian reported in January.

GUZI HE, “NYU LAW SCHOOL PROJECT SEEKS TO OBTAIN RIGHTS FOR NON-LIVING ENTITIES: TREES, ROCKS, AND NATURE ITSELF” COLLEGE FIX, JULY 24, 2024

The trees, rocks, nature, etc. are not true participants. Only the human litigants are. The project, if it succeeds, will empower and enrich environment activists at the expense of fellow humans who produce goods and services. What a magnet for university grads in courses that don’t lead to good jobs in a conventional marketplace!

“Ecocide” as the New Genocide?

Another environment activist project that Smith notes is trying to get Vlad Putin, hero of almost nobody outside of Russia, charged with ecocide:

Under his orders, the Russian army has destroyed property, ruined infrastructure, and caused unquantifiable misery. Nothing can mitigate the harm he has caused, and he should be made to pay the highest price in a courtroom and in history.

But . . . should he ever be called to so face the music, he should not be charged with “ecocide” because Russian forces allegedly blew up a dam causing ruinous damage. But that is precisely what some Ukrainians and environmentalists are advocating.

WESLEY J. SMITH, “NO, PUTIN SHOULD NOT BE CHARGED WITH THE ‘CRIME’ OF ‘ECOCIDE’,” NATIONAL REVIEW, JULY 26, 2024

“Ecocide” is clearly intended as an equivalent to genocide. In short, causing environment damage can be equated with murder. It’s not hard to see where an activist political group can take that one.

And then there is the project to make a glacier president of Iceland: “The campaign that sought to nominate Snæfellsjökull, an Icelandic glacier, for president was the first attempt within Iceland to establish Rights of Nature.” As Smith notes,

In other words, the “nature rights” movement isn’t “merely” about a right for rivers to flow freely (“river rights“) or to allow people to sue on behalf of mountains to prevent the mining of minerals, a strategy that has already prevented copper mining in Ecuador and Panama. Given the climate-change connection, it is far more ambitious. If nature has a right to (somehow) prevent climate change, no human enterprise or activity deemed to contribute to global warming will be safe from interference by courts or nature-rights commissions.

WESLEY J. SMITH, “ICELANDERS NOMINATED A GLACIER FOR PRESIDENT TO PUSH ‘NATURE RIGHTS’ MOVEMENT, NATIONAL REVIEW, JULY 30, 2024

In short, in a world where panpsychism is the science and neo-paganism is the art, it appears that environmental activists’ rights will increase and workers’ rights will decrease.

Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.