<
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2024/09/11/forest-rights-nature-ecuador>
"Jose Martín Ovando suddenly halts in his tracks and crouches down along the
steep forest path shrouded in mist, pulling out a magnifying glass from his
small backpack to inspect a clump of deep green moss.
Among the greenery, he has spotted an orchid:
Dracula morleyi. Blotted in
black with a flash of white at the center, it’s barely bigger than a
fingernail. “This place is full of so much biodiversity,” he grins. “Scientists
don’t even know about most of it.”
Ovando is a guide at Los Cedros Protective Forest, a 4,800-hectare
(11,860-acre) reserve of cloud forest in the northwest Ecuadorian Andes, one of
the world’s most biodiverse areas.
This tropical haven—home to a wealth of wildlife, including the critically
endangered black-and-chestnut eagle and brown-headed spider monkey, jaguars,
endemic frogs, more than 300 species of birds, 600 kinds of moths, and 200
varieties of orchids—is at the forefront of a global movement to recognize the
legal rights of the natural world.
The movement is rooted in the common Indigenous belief that nature—from the
Andean mountains to Amazonian rivers right down to a single soldier ant—is a
system to which human beings belong and with which they must harmoniously
coexist. The legal theory argues that these ecosystems and species have
intrinsic rights that should be protected in the same way as those of humans.
“The idea that rocks, rivers, and animals are alive and so should be granted a
legal status is a core aspect of Indigenous worldviews,” says César
Rodríguez-Garavito, professor of clinical law and director of NYU School of
Law’s More Than Human Rights Project, an initiative attempting to further
nonhuman rights and the larger web of life. “Indigenous peoples have turned
that belief into practices of reciprocity with nature, through ceremonies, use
of medicinal plants, and more.”
The planet faces a human-led sixth mass extinction that has already wiped out
entire species and risks destroying whole ecosystems. This destruction would
accelerate under authoritarian regimes and right-wing agendas around the globe,
including Project 2025 in the United States. Los Cedros is the world’s leading
example of how non-anthropocentric laws can be used to effectively defend the
planet."
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/create-the-right-conditions/
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
