UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Editors’ Note

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.1093/isle/isaa160

Auteurs

Christina Gerhardt · Jennifer Westerman

Année déclarée

2020

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.770816+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:13:45.343453+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

Understatement of the year: these times are ones of intense change. We can think of them as geologic layers: COVID 19; protests in response to the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among too many others, which, in turn, has led for renewed demands for long overdue structural changes; and now the economic crisis, to name only a few. Thinking intersectionally, rather than geologically, which is perhaps more appropriate for a temporal chronology, (ever-shifting) overlapping circles, with a different center for each, might be a more appropriate image. Perhaps best is to think both together. With all of these changes taking place and many of us radically re-localized, it seems quite timely to reconsider concepts of community. Who are we in community with? What constitutes that community? How do we work to leverage whatever power we might have to support the most vulnerable around us? From the ground up, when (federal, state, or local) infrastructures may be lacking? It is not only about filling the gap but about creating a new fabric and weave during a very desperate time for so many. How do we proceed? This moment calls for attentive listening to stories about injustice and vulnerabilities and to stories that restore and provide hope. To make sense of the adulterated world, this moment calls for seeing anew. We may find ourselves uneasily stepping forward to look closely and stepping back again to take in a broader view, seeking meaning, as we find our footing and more clearly imagine a way forward. Two 2019 ASLE Graduate Student Paper Award winners published in this volume offer some possible approaches. Carlos Alonso Nugent’s “Latinx Literature in the Anthropocene” argues, “we can keep advancing arguments about responsibility (‘the Global North has created the Capitaliocene’) and vulnerability (‘the Global South has suffered through the Plantationocene’). At the same time, though, we must start asking questions about perspective.” José Martí’s “Nuestra América” is the focus of Nugent’s destabilizing narrative. “We are living in the Anthropocene,” Nugent suggests, “a geological epoch in which we wield power over the entire planet. But who, exactly, is the ‘we’ in that sentence?” Even as we write, we are thinking about what constitutes the “we.” It is about the politics of inclusion. Who speaks? To whom? Who is included in the conversation? And what role does seeing anew or otherwise play? In “The Ecological Vision of Xu Bing’s Dragonfly Eyes,” Pao-Chen Tang examines the acclaimed Chinese artist’s 2017 film, an assemblage of pieced together surveillance camera footage. Tang notes that “Since the early 2010s, the mechanism of the surveillance camera has literally taken up the form of the compound eye.” As singular tiny lenses within the compound eyes of arthropods, the ommatidia collectively synchronize vision just as Tang suggests that “each part of the video—however seemingly discrete—works with one another, forming a whole whose operation is governed by an underlying principle of correspondence.” Tang asks readers to consider what “the audiovisual components of Dragonfly Eyes tell us about its guiding viewpoint?” Taken together, the contributors to this issue examine the perspectives of writers, Indigenous leaders, and landscapes, extending our understanding of how beliefs shape personal and political actions. These provocative lines of inquiry are not unrelated to questions raised by the special cluster on the global rights of nature movement: “Trans-species Listening and Rights of Nature: Legal Persons Beyond the Human.” How do social conditions, folk stories, cultural beliefs, Indigenous ways of knowing, and political actions shape ideas about the rights of nature? What cosmologies and philosophies shape our understanding of legal personhood? If we examine perspectives on the “equality of all things,” what deeply held beliefs, foundations, and relations guide our viewpoints? What has been overlooked? How do such moral frameworks correspond and differ across cultures, religions, and regions when we assign rights to nature? Resulting from a 2018 workshop organized around a screening of The Rights of Nature: A Global Movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuFNmH7lVTA, this special cluster extends the understanding of what granting legal personhood to nonhuman species and the land means in mind and in practice. In 1972, when Christopher Stone published the article “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” he paired the right to legal standing with moral questions about the value of nonhuman life, an exploration continued in Roderick Nash’s 1989 The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics, Cormac Cullinan’s Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (2003), and more recently in David R. Boyd’s 2017 The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution that Could Save the World. Throughout the journal’s history—from Jim Tarter’s 1996 article “Collective Subjectivity and Postmodern Ecology” to Sophie Christman’s 2019 “‘I Have a Dream’: Erasing American Ecophobia”—ISLE contributors have contemplated various dimensions of assigning rights to nature. The authors in the current special cluster invigorate and complicate engagement with these discussions, examining how the global rights of nature movement works for the Shawi in Peru in Juan Carlos Galeano’s documentary film, El Río: The River, and its analog Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (Adamson); for Buddhist nun Shih Chao-hwei and the protection of nonhuman species in Taiwan (Nicolaisen); for Avni the tiger and marginalized communities in India (Aiyadurai); and for the Tūhoe and earth jurisprudence in the Te Urewera in New Zealand (Crimmel and Goeckeritz and Kauffman). The rights of nature movement, these writers collectively assert, must ask this question: “How do these universalizing frameworks harmonize differing concepts of life?” while remaining steadfastly cognizant of and responsive to the cultural, social, and political contexts within which rights are assigned. In their introduction to the special cluster, Jeffrey Nicolaisen, Ambika Aiyadurai, and Prasenjit Duara review the movement’s history and suggest the complexities of its global application, particularly for Indigenous communities. The creative writers gathered here consider this kind of multidimensional view of nonhuman life and the land, contemplating how histories, relationships, and actions inform experiences with resacas, islands, and glaciers. Poet Dorothy Lawrenson’s “Volver” reminds readers that what may appear fixed may have once been fluid, like “resacas: relics of a river” that no longer return to the Río Grande. While there is beauty in these isolated lakes, the memory of connection pulls on the writer. In “Time Signatures,” Christian Knoeller offers a poignant reflection, moving between seeing previously unseen versions of the land—Long Island on Coronelli's 1688 Terrestrial globe—and a life, now fixed “by machine, each breath / suspended, vapor in a respirator.” Knoeller, as Lawrenson, connects remembering with seeing in the present while granting “equality of nature” as Nicolaisen so beautifully describes the idea in his essay for this issue. Teddi Lynn Chichester’s “Below Exit Glacier” takes up this perspective, walking alongside Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Chichester wonders what remains, retreating and marking the disappearance of time “As single years supplant decades / In the race of the melt.” In an essay of creative nonfiction, “The Inkas Married the Earth: Excavating Machu Picchu,” Anandam Kavoori writes, “I close my eyes and try to see Machu Picchu as a living, breathing estate, to try and hear the sound of water as it must have gurgled and gushed through its canals and splashed into basins.” For these writers, calling forth memory becomes a way to consider how cosmologies, histories, and human actions shape worldviews. Other scholars in this issue continue to trouble the notion of fixed views and altered landscapes. In the article, “And Man Should Have No Dominion: The Ecological Worldview of Charles Olson,” Leila Crawford examines the life and work of poet Charles Olson, asserting that Olson recognized “the importance of the land and space as well as nature’s relation to myth.” For Crawford, Olson’s poems “are like maps: they simultaneously focus in and zoom out on the landscape,” providing a deep sense of place that informs the poet’s reflections on his Gloucester home. Crawford encourages readers to see Olson as an ecological thinker confronting human/nonhuman dichotomies. Emily Lyons offers a similar challenge to rethink interpretations of two novels in the article “‘O Little Isle!’: Landscape, Englishness, and Apocalypse in The Last Man and The War of the Worlds.” These texts, Lyons asserts, offer a “cautionary lesson on imperialism,” one that joins “English cultural identity to almost utopian pastoral constructions of English landscape, thrown into sharp relief by the threat of environmental apocalypse and attendant racial panic,” which do not dismantle racial and cultural divides despite their “subversive potential.” Contributors Scott Obernesser and Cuilin Sang also consider the ways that writers destabilize pervasive cultural narratives, academic categories, and entrenched institutions. In “The Ecology of Porous Modernism in ‘Naples’ and ‘Zone,’” Sang adopts the notion of “porous modernity,” to show how “minerality not only “naturizes” modernism, but also renders the porosity of modernism texturely “hard” (albeit permeable), emotionally intense, and psychologically disorienting.” Sang shares with Obernesser an emphasis on exposing “dirty” presumptions inherent in some literary movements. Obernesser argues that “tracing oil in On The Road reveals the problems of countercultural expression based within or dependent upon the systems actively being opposed” in “What It Means to Be On The Road: Mobility and Petrocultures During the Mid-Twentieth Century.” These authors have in common a desire to re-vision, to see again. From US states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, to Ecuador, Germany, India, New Zealand, and El Salvador, movements to grant rights to nature are emerging. At the very center of these new forms of ecological governance are questions about who and what counts—both in the sense of who is counted and who does the counting. It is a question of seeing and of being seen. It is a question of what stories are told, about what and whom, and by whom. It is a question of an ability to listen and to listen well—to stories of the people, the land, and sentient beings. “It is as if Dragonfly Eyes is commenting on the futility of collecting and archiving images when they are not animated through storytelling,” Tang writes.

Identifiants

DOI

10.1093/isle/isaa160

OPENALEX

W4238614240

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

article

Juridictions étudiées — sources explicites

IN · NZ · PE

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Fleuve / rivière · Lac · Glacier · Espèce · Paysage

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa160
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W4238614240

Statut documentaire

Validée documentairement

Bibliothèque