<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/25/legal-bid-for-ecuador-forest-to-be-recognised-as-song-co-creator>
"A forest in Ecuador could be recognised as the co-creator of a song under a
groundbreaking legal proposal.
A petition is to be submitted to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the
Los Cedros cloud forest as the co-creator of the composition
Song of the
Cedars. The action by the More Than Human Life (Moth) project is the first
legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship of a work of art.
The song contains melodies of echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, rustling
leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the spot where
a new species of fungus was collected and described.
It was composed by the musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane,
field mycologist Giuliana Furci from the NGO Fungi Foundation and legal scholar
César Rodríguez-Garavito during a field trip to Ecuador.
The song was created when the group set up camp in the high forest during an
expedition organised by Macfarlane as part of his research for
Is a River
Alive?, his new book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, which
will be published in May 2025.
“It wasn’t written within the forest, it was written with the forest,” said
Macfarlane. “This was absolutely and inextricably an act of co-authorship with
the set of processes and relations and beings that that forest and its rivers
comprise. We were briefly part of that ongoing being of the forest, and we
couldn’t have written it without the forest. The forest wrote it with us.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
