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You are here: Home / Reviews / Books / Stopping species extinction — saving our bacon while saving our souls

Stopping species extinction — saving our bacon while saving our souls

By Erik Curren | May 21, 2012

Wild Law

Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, second edition, by Cormac Cullinan, foreword by Thomas Berry, Chelsea Green, 206pp, $19.95.

“Animal rights” always seemed to me like one of the most contrived and implausible concepts to come out of the politically correct left in the last few decades.

The idea conjured an image of urban hipsters whose main interface with wildlife was a fishbowl or hamster cage and who couldn’t believe that pickup truck drivers out in the boonies still did retrograde things like huntin’ and fishin’.  Or, maybe a line of anti-fur activists shivering by the steps of an opera house in December, waiting for the evening’s performance to let out so they could toss stage blood at the fox and sable coats of exiting socialites.

And even if you’re a person who’s more disturbed by the suffering of animals than by the plight of billions of human lives blighted by war, famine, disease and oppression across the globe and around the corner, how would you even go about expanding jurisprudence to cover wolves and bears, birds and bees and all sorts of creepy crawlies that you’ll never see in a PETA campaign?

I once knew a vegan lawyer from Santa Cruz who did animal rights work. It would’ve been a waste of sarcasm to ask whether squirrels approved her billable hours and trout paid her retainer. I already knew that her group was funded by philanthropic foundations, just as environmental groups got money to sue logging companies for cutting down giant redwoods.

But even if somebody else is paying for your lawyers, aren’t rights something you earn yourself through boycotts, protests, elections and even revolts and revolutions, all uniquely human activities?

Inalienable rights

It turns out that the most basic rights are not in fact earned by people who complain loudly enough. And they’re certainly not granted by enlightened rulers out of noblesse oblige. Instead, rights derive from some source outside of national governments, whether God or existence itself.

For example, the Declaration of Independence asserted that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” More recently, in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guaranteed the equality of all people under law even if individual oppressive governments have at one time or another enacted laws that discriminate on the basis of race, sex or religion.

In Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, author Cormac Cullinan, one of those environmental attorneys who use the legal system to try to stop corporations from destroying nature, argues that rights come from creation itself. As such, humans have no more right to rights, so to speak, than any other being on our planet.

And unlike PETA, Cullinan would not restrict earthly rights to animals but would recognize them in even inanimate features of the landscape.

Consider the right of a river to flow unimpeded, for example. If people settle by a stream and use its water to grow crops and raise cattle, then that can be a good thing, since it strengthens the relationship of human and river, allowing each entity to realize more of its own nature. But should the human settlement balloon into a city that dams the river for hydropower and then drains it nearly dry for taking showers and flushing toilets, then the relationship has become exploitative.

It’s the same for animals, as Cullinan writes:

Earth jurisprudence demands that we do not respond by exterminating the aardvarks, or controlling the rivers until they cease to be rivers and virtually become sewers boxed in concrete. It requires that we develop and implement wild laws that are able to recognize and celebrate the unique qualities of rivers and aardvarks. This may mean finding suitable land for landless people, preventing the construction of dwellings within the floodplain, or restoring wetlands to prevent floods.

No more “man vs. nature”

What’s refreshing about Cullinan’s approach is that he overcomes the dualism that so often bedevils any discussion of what humans owe to non-human creation.

Wild Law shows that hugging trees or hugging our kids is a false choice. Instead, Cullinan argues persuasively that if we really care about our kids, we’ll also need to hug a lot more trees. And that will mean adding some “wildness” to our systems of law.

It’s not just for selfish reasons and to protect the ecosystems that keep humans alive that we should create a legal framework to put an end to the destruction that characterizes the Anthropocene Age, where 200 species go extinct every day.

Adding wildness to our laws is also about saving our human souls. Because even if there were no limits to the growth of human numbers and works, and even if global consumer capitalism could marshall the physical resources to go on forever, we wouldn’t be happy continuing to live as we do alienated from our fellow creatures and from our own true natures. As Cullinan writes,

If we continue too long on this course our consciousnesses, and those of the generations that follow us, will no longer be shaped through interaction with the beauty, diversity and sheer unexpectedness of nature. Concrete parking lots breed parking-lot minds: uniform, barren, predictable and devoid of any sacred or any transcendental meaning.

What’s to be done? First, we must recognize that the human world is not separate, but part of, the natural world. Then, we must learn to live as good neighbors with the rest of creation, including other humans.

For example, as Cullinan calls for limiting the ambit of human powers and encouraging practices that honor and respect the earth community — like the complex rituals that indigenous hunters undertake before going hunting — he also wants more autonomy for human localities separate from state or federal governments within the developed world and less meddling by developed nations in the affairs of indigenous peoples.

Cry, the beloved country

Cullinan, a South African who lived through the transition from white-minority rule to a multi-racial democracy in the early 1990s, is a realistic optimist.

He recognizes that the prospects for the world to shake off plutocracy and get off its ecocidal course before it’s too late for humanity certainly look grim right now.  But he points out that breaking the grip of apartheid also looked unattainable in South Africa in the eighties under the iron rule of the white-supremacist National Party and President PW Botha.

So, just as both blacks and whites in South Africa became free from a stifling life under the pseudo-fascist apartheid regime, so today’s Earth Community, human and non-human alike, can free ourselves from an anthropocentric rule that oppresses us as it exploits rivers, forests and bears, supposedly for the benefit of our species but, in fact, merely for the profits of a small self-serving elite.

A weakness of Cullinan’s discussion is that he offers little political advice on how to start changing our structure of law in the developed world, aside from a few examples of places that have recognized the rights of nature already, such as Ecuador. But making such a monumental and historic change in jurisprudence in Washington, Brussels or Beijing will be an order of magnitude more difficult than changing even the constitution of a small Third World nation.

Yet, Cullinan’s approach has a can-do attitude to recommend it. Unlike some animal rights advocates, who see humanity as the bad guys, Cullinan invites people, as “unusually gifted members of the [Earth] Community,” to apply our impressive arts and technologies for the benefit of all species.

“Our responsibility for the Earth is not simply to preserve it,” as Cullinan quotes his guru, the late eco-philosopher and Catholic priest Thomas Berry, “it is to be present to the Earth in its next sequence of transformations. While we were unknowingly carried through the evolutionary process in former centuries, the time has come when we must in some sense guide and energize the process ourselves.”

— Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Filed Under: Books Tagged With: animal rights, apartheid, Cormac Cullinan, environmental regulations, human rights, PETA, South Africa, species extinction, Thomas Berry

About Erik Curren

Erik Curren is the publisher of Transition Voice. He co-founded Transition Staunton Augusta in 2009 and serves as CEO of Curren Media Group. He's published books on Buddhism and solar power. He's now working on his fourth book, Abolish Oil Now! Our Last, Best Hope to Save the Climate, Stop Endless Wars, and Live in Freedom.

Comments

  1. Auntiegrav says

    May 21, 2012 at 10:54 am

    Thanks Eric. You guys do great book reviews 🙂
    I’ve tried to express my take on this in other ways, but the fundamental issue is to first determine what a “right” is, and where it comes from.
    We have to stop allowing the ethereal “God” or “Creator” or “Nature” to go unquestioned if we are to truly understand how to determine the laws of our physical reality.
    As far as I can tell, “Nature” grants only one right to living things: the Right to Try to Live. (It doesn’t grant a Right to Life, or everything would be hungry.)
    This is the “Invisible Hand” in the natural world, where predators, prey, and plants end up coexisting constructively, rather than destructively. If they are destructive (net consumptive of resources), they go extinct. If they are constructive (Net Useful: giving more to the future than they take), then they MAY continue to exist (if they aren’t randomly wiped out by catastrophic events). This is how nature distributes risk and DNA stores adaptations to the risks that it survives (whatever doesn’t kill something allows it to grow stronger, and luck favors the prepared).
    Humans have, as Cullinan points out, separated themselves from the natural world and its moderating forces through medicine, agricultural extraction, and firepower. This has set us up for repeating and ever-increasing Malthusian Trap events (growing food supplies and reducing threats will increase population, which increases the demand for food and risk of threats).
    Legal rights are a quid-pro-quo between individuals and society (we agree not to kill people and the society agrees to not execute us for no reason: the ‘Right’ to life). As long as both parties adhere to the agreement, it works (as long as we avoid the Malthusian Trap).
    In the end, humans have to realize how natural law insists we give more to our future than we consume in resources.
    Politically, the most effective option right now should be based on where people make decisions (the checkout lane), and that means the rights of nature should be reflected in the price of the things we consume: a sales tax that is high enough to moderate our behavior and protect nature. We’ve had discussion of the Carbon Tax thing, but that only addresses one small aspect of the human desire to consume things.
    The sales tax itself only addresses our consumption, it does not guarantee that we will be generous to nature (the real goal). That will require leadership and social constructs that are currently beyond the ken of humanity. In other words, an overall consumption tax is just the first step to becoming a different species (homo sapiens generosicus vs homo consumpticus).
    Actually, we know that this species actually used to exist. If it didn’t, we would have gone extinct with the other bipedal primates. Somewhere between pre-sapiens and modern EHMs (economic hit men), we learned to inhabit the land and contribute to it without dying off, so this isn’t a totally foreign possibility. It’s just very hard to overcome so many generations of conditioning by money to live in the money/God/imaginary model nurtured in our heads from birth rather than the actual physical universe.

    Reply
    • Erik Curren says

      May 21, 2012 at 3:31 pm

      Auntigrav, you write great comments! As badly deceived as modern humans to think that industrialized consumerism is actually the Good Life, it’s heartening to me to remember that throughout 99% of human history our ancestors lived as homo sapiens generosicus, as you put it. And so many of us are feeling that dissatisfaction in our souls that seems to me like the best chance for humans to voluntarily curb our own destructive ways before Nature steps in and lets the Four Horsemen do the job for us.

      Reply

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