Nature as Legal Entity

Created: Tue May 27 2025 02:00:00 GMT+0200 (Central European Summer Time)

In the book Ways of Being by James Bridle in Chapter 8: Solidarity, there are stories recounted about animals going to trial. One particular one is about pigs that consumed parts of a 5-year old boy in 1457 in Savigny-sur-Etang, France. The mother pig was sentenced to death while her piglets were off the hook due to their age.

This reminds me of the musical Wicked which is the backstory of how the Wicked Witch of the West from Wizard of Oz becomes, well wicked. The inspiration for the talking animals and the annex of them in the musical and now movie, is taken directly from the source material of the whimsical land of Oz. However, I couldn't help but make the connection that we, or at least people in France, once viewed animals as legal entities and treated them as if they were humans.

An overly simplified graph, but this is how I see our current position. Where as time goes on and we progress with technology, our relationship to nature diminishes and perhaps gets destroyed in the process.

Kelsey Leonard states in her Ted Talk, "Legal personhood grants us the ability to be visible in the court of law, and to have our voices heard as a person protected under the law...If you can grant this to a corporation, why not the great lakes, why not the Mississippi River, why not the many waterways across our planet that we all depend on to survive." This is the point of view from the States where this is happening around the world though.

In Coding Care: Towards a Technology for Nature magazine, in the article Body with More Organs by Ingo Nierman notes the shift in governmental bodies in granting the rights to nature with Ecuador and Bolivia spearheading the ecological movement. In 2011, legal guardians were granted to the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador.

To see a list of what's going on in the world, the United Nations initiative Harmony with Nature is advocating and documenting the rights of nature.

Maybe one day we will arrive at a diagram more like the on above where we have a symbiotic and respectful relationship between these two forces. Where there's ebb and flow and at times one will be in more favour than the other and times there's more in harmony. But there's always a consideration for both

Bibliography

BRIDLE, James, 2022. Ways of being: animals, plants, machines: the search for a planetary intelligence. First American edition. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-60111-9.

MAGRINI, Boris et al., 2022. Coding care: towards a technology for nature. Berlin : Hatje Cantz Verlag. Zeitgenössische Kunst. ISBN 978-3-7757-5456-9.

TED, 2020. Why lakes and rivers should have the same rights as humans | Kelsey Leonard [online]. 14 January 2020. Retrieved from : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opdCfb8cCFw [accessed 27 May 2025].

To Read

TOLEDO, Camille de, 2021. Le fleuve qui voulait écrire: les auditions du parlement de Loire. Paris : Manuella éditions LLL, les Liens qui libèrent. ISBN 979-10-209-1006-6.