Aseem Shrivastava
This essay interrogates the “rights of nature” discourse, arguing that it extends one of modernity’s most anthropocentric concepts—individual rights—onto nature rather than questioning the framework of rights itself. Drawing on Raimon Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision, Martin Buber’s philosophy, and Mary Midgley’s essay on dolphin personhood, Aseem Shrivastava argues that rights discourse presupposes separateness before relation, which risks feeding the financialisation of nature rather than healing “ecological alienation”— a deeper ontological wound that legal personhood cannot address.
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“Kawa is a response to the long-standing imposition of other people’s values and drivers in how the Whanganui River is to be governed and managed…the Whanganui model should be understood as an Indigenous law model, recognising Indigenous authority and Indigenous Rights, rather than a model for Rights of Nature.”1
Introduction
In recent decades, courts and legislatures around the world have begun to grant legal personhood or ‘rights’ to rivers, forests, and mountains. The Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganga and Yamuna in India, and various ecosystems in Ecuador (the first country to legalise the ‘rights of nature’, in 2008) and Bolivia have all, in different ways, been drawn into the language of rights. On the face of it, this looks like moral progress: an expansion of the circle of legal consideration beyond the human.
However, this is so only if we believe that morality arises from the law, rather than the other way around. A closer philosophical look, guided by Raimon Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision (explained below) and a developed ecosophical critique of modernity, suggests that the ‘rights of nature’ movement, however well-intentioned, may rest on a conceptual foundation too shallow to bear the weight of the enormous crisis of civilisation it hopes to address. This essay develops that critique. It argues that the rights discourse, by extending one of modernity’s most anthropocentric inventions to the natural world, changes very little at the level of ontology. Further, itrisks feeding directly into the financialization of nature. Moving away from the master discourse of the day, a genuinely ecosophical response, in congruence with “the wisdom of the earth” must move from a grammar of contractual claims to an idiom of kinship, responsibility, participation, and communion, aspects of human life diluted, if not, in many cases, destroyed by the advance of modernity.2
The Practical and the Ontological
It is important, from the outset, to distinguish two separate questions that are often collapsed into one: whether the rights of nature are politically useful or expedient, and whether they are philosophically adequate. These are not the same question, and conflating them has muddied much of the public discussion. The rights discourse can be tactically valuable, for the time being. It has already been invoked in courtrooms to slow dam projects, mining operations, and pollution. This, however, only shows the depths of ecological folly to which metropolitan culture has sunk. At the cosmological plane, like so many ‘solutions’ today, it remains a symptom of the very disease it is trying to treat. Holding these two evaluations apart allows for a more honest reckoning: one can support the strategic use of the language of rights in the immediate short term while still insisting that it cannot be the foundation for the sort of cosmic, cultural, and psychic renewal that is necessary to face what is not just a polycrisis but a crisis of civilisation itself. Only thus can human culture become ecological once again. The eventual alternative is heat death, and not only for the human species.
It is important to understand that this is not just a semantic quibble. Language does not come to us innocent. It is powerful and loaded with history. It is fraught with associations and connotations, effectively embodying a world-view in it. Language, especially in the legal context, brings with it a whole world of malapropisms, concepts and practices which successfully disable the introduction of fresh concerns and ideas founded on other ontologies. We need a whole new grammar to address concerns for which the old legal language (developed for quite different purposes) is inadequate, inappropriate, even dangerous at times. In our case, the unqualified use of the language of rights in the context of the defence of the natural world is prone (as we shall see later in this essay) to philosophical errors which give birth to a slew of fruitless questions which only compound the anthropocentrism of modernity.
The Grammar of Rights
Rights are not a neutral or universal category. They emerged out of a particular historical worldview: that of modern Europe, in the wake of the Enlightenment. Built into the very idea of a ‘right’ are a cluster of interlocking assumptions — that the individual is the primary bearer of value, that ‘collective rights’ (of the kind that may be essential to defend a language or a tradition, a culture or an ecology) make little sense, that law is the chief regulator of social life, that society is best understood as a collection of autonomous entities, that the state exists primarily to guarantee the rights of individuals, and that conflict is fundamentally a matter of competing claims to be adjudicated by a state (whose own historical antecedents and moral basis need never be questioned).
Within the historical context of modern Europe, human rights were a genuine civilizational achievement (especially after the barbarism of the world wars of the 20th century). They placed, at least theoretically, real limits on arbitrary power and offered protection to the vulnerable. (Practically, many decades on, the world is witness to a genocide even as this is being written; the success of ‘human rights’ is plainly questionable, but more on this later).
It is worth noticing what this framework presupposes before it does any of its protective work. It assumes a world already divided into separate, alienated subjects who must then negotiate their coexistence through legal claims. Separateness comes first; relation is secondary, as something to be established or repaired through law. This is precisely the picture that Panikkar’s cosmotheandric intuition calls into question. For Panikkar, relation is not something added onto already-existing, self standing beings. Relation precedes individuality. The birth of a child already presupposes a social ensemble, a family or a community which offers the cultural ecology for her growth and development. A person does not first exist as an isolated Robinson Crusoe, who subsequently may or may not enter into relationships with others. Rather, one exists only through and within relationships — among the cosmos, humanity, and the divine, the three inseparable dimensions of the real. Cosmos, theos, and anthropos together constitute the three synergising dimensions of what is real, of what Panikkar means by the cosmotheandric intuition.
Rights discourse begins from the opposite direction: from a separate entity called the ‘individual,’ whose separateness is treated as metaphysically primary. This is already a substantive, consequential ontological decision, made before a single right has been assigned. It is a decision that quietly shapes everything built on top of it.
Why ‘Rights of Nature’ Feels Odd and Unsatisfactory
The rights of nature movement sets out to overcome anthropocentrism, but it often does so, ironically, by universalizing one of modernity’s most anthropocentric concepts. Nature is granted rights because humans (or at least some humans) already possess rights; the concept is extended outward rather than interrogated at its root. Instead of asking why the ontology of rights should be trusted as the right vocabulary at all, the movement asks how far that vocabulary can be stretched.
The difference can be put simply. The rights of nature approach asks: should rivers become legal persons? A deeper, more ecosophical question asks instead: why did rivers ever have to be seen as legal objects in the first place? Is not a violent amnesia about traditional customary relationships to animals and trees, mountains and rivers at the back of such an anthropocentric conception?
The second question reaches further back, into the historical process by which a living presence was first reduced to an inert thing available for ownership, exploitation and dispute. Panikkar would likely push the inquiry even further, asking not simply whether nature has rights, but what kind of being imagines itself sufficiently outside of nature to be in a position to decide the question at all. Such a reframing changes everything. The problem stops being a narrowly legal one and becomes cultural and existential. It concerns not what nature is owed, but who we have become that we stand in a position to owe anything to it in the first place. It suggests a deeper alienation which underlies much of environmental thought , something overlooked by an exclusively rights-based approach.
Ecological Alienation as the Deeper Wound
This is where the notion of structural ecological alienation becomes indispensable. Ecological alienation is not simply environmental degradation, measured in emissions or extinctions. It is a disturbance in the very ecology of being. Humans no longer inhabit the world. The privileged among us stand over against it, as scientists or technocrats, managers or owners. Under this condition, nature is variously recast as matter, resource, capital, ecosystem service, biodiversity stock, natural infrastructure, or scenery. These labels sound quite different from one another, but ontologically they belong to the same family. Each treats nature as an object available for measurement, calculation and potential use and extraction.
What is striking is that even the rights of nature discourse often leaves this underlying ontology untouched. Nature remains an object; it has simply acquired in just a handful of cases legal standing as an object. The grammar, and the understanding beneath it, has barely changed. A river with rights is still, in the deepest sense, a river conceived as separate from us, now merely equipped with a new legal wardrobe which we use to ‘clothe’ and defend it.
Is the tree a mere object? A short digression
Martin Buber’s famous meditation on a tree, offered near the opening of I and Thou, challenges the lineage of thought which grounds legal rights in a prior cognitive objectification.3 Buber invites the reader to consider a tree and notices that there are several familiar ways of “having” it before the mind. We can regard it as a picture, an arrangement of colour and form to be admired. We can classify it botanically, as a species with a genus and a life-process. We can reduce it to physics and chemistry, a configuration of forces, cells, and light-absorption. We can even treat it as an expression of a law, an instance of some general principle. In every one of these modes the tree remains an object — something over against the observer, available to be viewed, explained, catalogued, measured, and potentially extracted for timber. This is the world Buber calls I-It: knowledge, use, and management, however refined, but without relation.
Yet Buber insists that something else can also happen, and that it may occur even while all of this scientific and aesthetic apprehension is still present and undisturbed in the background. It may befall a person, in simply gazing at the tree, to be drawn into relation with it, so that the tree ceases to be a mere It and becomes, however briefly, a Thou. This does not require abandoning botany or physics. None of those ways of knowing needs to be annulled. Rather, they are taken up into something that exceeds them — a relation in which the tree confronts the person as a presence rather than a scientific, commercial, or legal specimen, and, in meeting it as such, they discover something of their own presence. The tree becomes, in this sense, a mirror in which the human recognises himself not as a detached knower surveying inert matter, but as a being capable of relation, addressed by what is other than himself and, in turn, addressing the tree as subject, perhaps another expression of a deeper reality. In India, for instance, there is hardly a village, town, or city in which certain sacred trees like Banyan or Peepul, do not have red, orange, yellow or white strings (called maulis) tied to them, indicating that the human community in the vicinity relates to them as though to living subjects, not inert objects.
This is strikingly close to the cosmotheandric and animist sensibilities traced above, even though Buber arrives at it from within a Jewish dialogical tradition rather than from Panikkar’s Hindu-Christian cosmology or the kinship cosmologies of indigenous peoples. Where the Ganga is Mother and the mountain is elder or ancestor (as with the Dongria Kondh of Odisha in India), Buber’s tree is Thou — in each case a living presence met in relation, rather than a specimen surveyed, classified, or priced. And just as rights of nature can grant a river legal personhood while leaving its underlying objecthood intact, so too, for Buber, no amount of accurate scientific description of the tree brings a person one step closer to encountering it as Thou. The shift from It to Thou is not a further refinement of knowledge but a different quality of meeting altogether; it cannot be legislated, measured, or purchased into being. A different dimension of consciousness and experience are sought through the deepening of human awareness. It can only be entered into, again and again, as a standing possibility of addressing that the modern habit of objectification makes progressively harder to notice — and that an ecosophy of belonging must work patiently to recover.
“Is a Dolphin a Person?” A Further Reflection from Mary Midgley
So far, we have been speaking as though it is obvious what we mean by a ‘person.’ In general, we tend to quietly assume that a person is exclusively a human being. The moral philosopher Mary Midgley’s provocative essay “Is a Dolphin a Person?” uses a 1977 court case as a springboard to challenge the assumption that ‘person’ simply means ‘human being.’4
The essay opens with the trial of Kenneth le Vasseur, who freed two bottlenose dolphins from the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Marine Biology. He opted for a “choice of evils” defence, arguing that the dolphins’ captivity — characterized by isolation, overwork, food reduction, and self-destructive behavior — was causing imminent perceptible harm to “another.” The judge rejected this, ruling that a dolphin could not be “another person” under the penal code. Dolphins were property, not persons.
Midgley asks what made this seem “perfectly obvious” to the judge? She questions the equation of ‘person’ with ‘human being’ by tracing the word’s history. Persona in Latin originally meant a mask or character in a drama. Historically, and importantly, not all humans counted as persons either — slaves lacked legal personhood, and American courts well into the 20th century debated whether women were included in the word ‘persons.’
The irony of the court judgment is revealed by the fact that the corporation, self-evidently a man-made entity, is a ‘person’ in the eyes of the law, while a natural sentient being like a dolphin is not. Midgley mentions corporate personhood as one of several established precedents for calling non-human entities ‘persons,’ alongside the Persons of the Trinity and zoological ‘persons’ in colonial organisms. She cites Blackstone to note that “corporations or bodies politic…are formed and created by human laws for the purposes of society and government,” unlike “natural persons,” who can only be created by God. Her point is simply to show that “the law…can if it chooses create persons; it is not a mere passive recorder of their presence.”
Midgley’s central metaphor is that of life as a drama with many interwoven scripts. The question “who is a person?” is less like “who has two legs?” and more like “who is important?” — which immediately requires follow-up questions about context and purpose. Different beings matter in different dramas. To insist on a single script (such as the Social Contract) is intellectually “disastrous” and historically has been used in the Western world to exclude slaves, women, and now animals from moral consideration.
Midgley critiques Kant’s stark division between persons (rational beings with dignity) and things (objects to be used as means). She argues this “harsh, bright light” obscures the vast middle ground. A mouse is not a “thing” either — and certainly not a dolphin. Intelligence, if it is the criterion, comes in degrees. Dolphins, whales, and great apes have turned out to be far more cognitively and socially complex than previously assumed. Their competence in certain dimensions sometimes exceeds human faculties. She also dismisses the idea that language ability should be the gatekeeper of the compass of moral concern, noting that what truly matters is not speech but sensibility — the capacity to suffer and to mind what happens to oneself.
Midgley’s most important claim is that what makes creatures our fellow beings is not “intellectual capacity, but emotional fellowship.” The relevant qualities are “sensibility, social and emotional complexity of the kind which is expressed by the forming of deep, subtle and lasting relationships.” She contrasts dolphins with computers: however “intelligent” a computer becomes, it does not trouble our moral sleep unless it appears conscious, sensitive, and emotional. The “glaring fact” about dolphins and apes is that they are highly sensitive social beings who can mind what happens to them.
Midgley argues that legal standards crystallize around moral norms, and when those insights change deeply, the law must eventually catch up, though often with delays and jolts. She draws a parallel between the dolphin liberators (who called themselves the “Undersea Railroad”) and the pre-Civil War abolitionists who freed slaves. Just as slavery required the law to be broken and reformed, so too does our treatment of intelligent, socially complex animals. She concludes that we need “new thinking, new concepts and new words” about our relation to the non-human world.
In short, Midgley’s answer to her own title is: a dolphin may not be a human, but the concept of ‘person’ is far more flexible, contextual, and morally demanding than the law — and much of philosophy — has traditionally allowed.
The twin digressions — to the iconoclastic work of Martin Buber and Mary Midgley — have been offered in order to draw attention to the importance of rich relationality between the human and the non-human worlds. It is to underscore the difficulties that arise in legislating what we feel is right.
We may now return to the main thread of this essay, which is to situate the idea of ‘the rights of nature’ in the larger context of the urgency of arresting the intensifying desacralisation and disenchantment of nature in the modern world.
Contra-Actuality and the Slide Toward Financialization
The historical trajectory of modernity has been towards the rapid erosion and supersession of human community through the operation of globally active market forces. In the age of social media, actual face-to-face human communities are being rapidly eclipsed by an abstract digital network of the global market, keen to take the place of society itself. This requires a massive compulsory social transition from informal to more or less formal, contractual relationships. The concept of contra-actuality — modernity’s characteristic drift from formalization of relationships through successive stages of professionalization, contractualization, objectification, commodification, and finally transactionalization and monetisation — makes this danger especially visible. Rights discourse sits somewhere around the stage of contractualization: it recasts ecological relationships as legal relationships. But once everything is rendered contractual, it becomes disturbingly easy for it to become transactional as well, and this progression is already visible in the human world, where we do not hesitate any more to speak of ‘human resource’ or of ‘resource people’, let alone of ‘natural resources.’ Cognitive objectification applies to nature and humanity alike.
Nature first acquires measurable legal value. Then it acquires measurable ecological value. Ecosystem service value, biodiversity credits, carbon offsets, natural capital accounting, inter-species banking follow. Financial derivatives are built on top of all of the above. Each stage presents itself as a moral advance on the one before it — surely it is better to commercially value a wetland than to ignore it entirely (is that the only alternative?). Yet, each stage in fact deepens abstraction, pulling human reality further from lived experience. Rights do not strictly cause this slide into financialization (or inter-species money), but they fit with unsettling comfort into the same institutional grammar that makes the latter developments possible. Do we have no way of regarding and assigning value beyond the framework of money or scientific measures? This is precisely what worries serious critics about the ‘ecosystem services’ framework: services quietly become values, values become prices, prices become assets, and assets become investment opportunities, until the forest itself disappears behind a fog of lucrative accounting categories. There is a real paradox lurking here — the more precisely we learn to value nature in monetary or legal terms, the less capable we seem to become of simply dwelling in it. Our ecological alienation is only compounded by the tangle of abstractions in which we are led to exist. Ecosophy calls this mode of human be-ing homo abstract-us.
Participation Instead of Representation
Modern politics is built around representation. Because nature or the future cannot speak for themselves in a courtroom, living humans must speak on their behalf, and the ‘rights of nature’ become one mechanism for doing so. Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision points toward a different mode of apprehension altogether: participation rather than representation. We do not represent rivers; we belong with rivers. Which is why rivers have been worshipped for millennia across so many cultures. This will sound mystical to modern ears only because modernity has largely forgotten participation as a category of knowledge and being. That is, it has forgotten that knowing, being, and belonging were once understood as inseparable from one another. The enormous success, power, and prestige of laboratory science, not to forget the enormity of commercial exploitation it has made possible, is perhaps the key reason for this tragic amnesia. If we are to exploit nature limitlessly for commercial ends, even as we realise that protecting it minimally is essential even to sustain the extraction, it is much more convenient to see nature as ‘outside us’, as an object, in need of protection from our own excesses. From such cognitive premises, objectification is inevitable.
Kinship Is Not Metaphor
Here the testimony of non-Western civilizations becomes essential rather than merely illustrative. Across much of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, cosmologies developed that Western anthropology has often filed under the label ‘animism’ — a label that itself already begs the question, since it presumes a prior distinction between the living and the non-living that many of these traditions never made in quite that way.
In India, for instance, the cosmos is ordered intelligently, according to the ontological principle of Ṛta, the etymological origin of Ṛtu, or season. The great rivers are addressed as mothers — Ganga Ji, Narmada Maiyya — and in China the sky has long been understood as father, Tian, the ordering principle within which human society itself participates. Across many African cosmologies, land belongs not only to the living but equally to ancestors and to the unborn. Among numerous Native American peoples, rivers, mountains, and animals are kin rather than resources.
The temptation is to read all of this as anthropomorphism — as if these cultures were simply projecting human family structures onto an indifferent nature because they lacked better scientific categories. That reading gets the direction of the metaphor exactly backwards. To call the Ganga ‘Mother’ is not to project a human concept onto a river. Rather, the human family itself is understood as one local expression of a far larger order of cosmic kinship. Where modernity imagines the sequence running from the human outward — human family, then projected onto nature — the traditional cosmology runs the other way: cosmos first, and humanity participates within it. (Science too, acknowledges that the earth and the cosmos have existed for a period of time that is orders of magnitude greater than there has been humanity on earth. The space of the cosmos too is immeasurably larger than the space ‘allotted’ to humanity). Motherhood, on this view, is cosmic before it is ever biological. Kinship, in short, is ontological rather than metaphorical, and Panikkar’s cosmotheandric intuition grasps this with unusual clarity.
The traditional person, asked whether they truly believe the river is alive, might well respond with a counter-question: how could anyone imagine that it is not? Are we so ecologically blind and spiritually dead as to not be able to tell when a river is in raging spate or when it is sadly running dry and dying? This is not primitive credulity. A different ontology is being invoked altogether, one in which the living presence of the world is not first denied and then perhaps restored through argument, but simply never in question.
Rights as a Symptom of Prior Loss
This suggests a historical sequence worth stating plainly. First, with the rise of science and technology, comes desacralization: nature loses its sacred presence. Then, with expanding commerce, comes objectification: nature becomes a mere resource. Then comes exploitation and, in due course, ecological crisis. Only after all of this does anyone think to invent the ‘rights of nature’ as a remedy. The irony is striking: rights are an attempt to repair, juridically, a wound that was first inflicted ontologically, disturbing the very ecology of being. This does not make them worthless, but it does make them historically and philosophically secondary — an attempt at compensation for a loss that legal categories did not cause but cannot, by themselves, heal. They can suture the wound temporarily. But, as I argue below, true healing will call for a cognitive revolution on a much deeper, cosmological, plane.
In fact, even ‘suturing the wound’ temporarily is a doubtful claim. This is obvious when you notice how poorly the legal institutionalisation of even human rights has been able to defend the rights of millions, if not billions, of people around the world (depending on how you judge which rights to take into cognisance). So, why should we believe that the rights of nature will be honoured in actual practice, even if they are written into the statutes? The point is that unless clear cognisance is taken of the immense power not only of the competitive forces of global political economy, and their consequences for the natural world, but of the presumed ontologies used to defend the structure of power (Dolphins are “property”), we will not succeed in evolving an effective ecological ethic which can guide us forward.
Cosmic Responsibility, Not Claims
There is another way of seeing things. Panikkar speaks frequently of humanity’s “cosmic responsibility”: the charge to keep the Earth habitable and hospitable, for humanity and for all other species, into the indefinite future. This is almost the mirror inverse of a rights-based ethic. Rights ask, at bottom, what may I legitimately claim? Cosmic responsibility asks instead, what does reality ask of me? One movement begins with the modern self and its entitlements; the other begins with the cosmos and its needs. Because human beings possess unique capacities — reflection, foresight, technological power — they bear correspondingly unique responsibilities. Not privileges or sovereignty, but responsibilities. (In this realisation might also lie our unique freedom, a much larger topic).
This resonates strongly with Gandhi’s conviction that duties precede rights, and that a society in which everyone attended faithfully to their duties would find that rights largely took care of themselves. In carrying out my/our duties, I/we would look after your rights and vice versa: you would look after mine/ours. One need not accept this claim in its entirety to find it ecologically suggestive. A civilization organized primarily around duties toward the living world is likely to behave very differently from one organized around rights within the living world — even if, in the end, the two arrangements protected an overlapping set of interests.
There is, however, a further refinement worth making here, one that guards against a facile conclusion. It would be a mistake to simply replace rights with duties, if duties are understood merely as the mirror image of rights within the same legal grammar — as obligations owed rather than claims held, but still items on a ledger. Panikkar’s cosmic responsibility points toward something more basic than either.
Responsibility, in his cosmic sense, is not first a legal or moral obligation at all; it is an existential response arising from a living, human participation in the cosmotheandric Whole. We are responsible because we are constituted by our relations — with the earth, with other beings, with the divine — not because a rule has been imposed upon us from outside. Duties, on this reading, are one historical and cultural expression of that deeper reality, not a substitute vocabulary that could simply take the place of rights and do the same job better.
The Superior Guardianship of Custom
If custom and inherited practice do the deep work, then the relevant contrast may be less ‘rights versus duties’ than ‘contract versus kinship.’ Rights and duties, in their familiar juridical form, both belong to a contractual imagination in which discrete,‘autonomous’ individuals negotiate claims and obligations between themselves. Panikkar’s cosmotheandric vision, and the relational ecologies built upon it, belong instead to a world of kinship, in which identity itself is constituted through belonging rather than assembled out of prior, separate parts. A river cared for as kin is not protected because it holds legal standing. She is cared for because she is one of us, and we belong with her. Custom expresses this recognition. Law, at its best, merely echoes it in abstract form.
This is where, for example, the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s reflections become especially pertinent. Tagore repeatedly contrasted mechanical regulation with organic culture, arguing that civilizations endure not because their rules become ever more elaborate and effective (that is usually a sign of decline), but because habits of beauty, restraint, and mutual regard become second nature to their members. Education, rituals, festivals, village life, and the seasonal rhythms of agrarian existence all cultivate sensibilities that make ecological destruction appear almost unthinkable, without any need for a policeman, a tribunal, or a piece of constitutional legislation.
Modernity, by contrast, replaces these inherited sensibilities with bureaucratic administration — and the consequence is that regulation must continually expand precisely because culture continually contracts, as the economy continually expands. The proliferation of laws merely signals the decline of culture, for all effective laws have a largely self-reinforcing quality. This looks very much like a law of civilizational entropy: as living custom weakens, law must grow ever more elaborate to compensate, and yet can never quite catch up. The cultural ground vanishes almost invisibly below our despairing, living feet.
The Modern State’s Internal Contradiction
A further, more institutional problem compounds all of this. The modern state, whatever rights it may grant to rivers or forests, has no single, unified conception of the good it is pursuing. One ministry may be charged with protecting a forest; another licenses mining within it. One ministry defends the ‘rights’ of a river; another dams it in the name of industrial development or export revenues. This contradiction is not an unfortunate accident of poor coordination — it is routinely structural. Modern states exist primarily to grow national geopolitical influence and to manage competing interests domestically, not to embody a single, coherent cosmology of how humans ought to relate to the living world. Traditional civilizations certainly had their own conflicts and failures, but they generally operated within a broadly unified picture of reality. Modern governance operates without any such unifying picture at all, which is why the same state can simultaneously defend and dam the same river without any deep sense of internal contradiction.
For cultures grounded in traditions, there are beliefs and myths about mountains, rivers, and forests which are honoured to enable their protection. But for modernity, there are none. Metropolitan skepticism wants to know reasons, without realising that reasons of heart and spirit in traditional cultures are often not even consciously articulated, let alone be understood by observers from elsewhere, trained exclusively in modern systems of knowledge.
Law Cannot Cultivate Reverence
This points to what may be the most radical implication of the whole argument: if an ecological civilization depends primarily on law, it has, in an important sense, already failed. Law can prohibit, but it cannot cultivate reverence. It can punish, but it cannot generate gratitude. It can regulate extraction, but it cannot teach belonging. These capacities emerge only through culture — through the accumulated, lived inheritance of custom, ritual, folkways, and relationship that a genuine civilization carries forward across generations. An ecosophical ethics, on this view, would not begin with legislation at all. It would begin instead with the patient restoration of relationships — between people and place, between generations, between species, and between the human and the sacred — from which sound law should properly derive, rather than the reverse. And such law would only be effective if it is violated only in the exception, not when powerful structural forces work from the opposite direction to override it, by prompting the majority of people to ignore it.
Modernity, in effect, reverses the proper order of things. Where a living culture would move from ontology to cosmology to culture to custom and only then, perhaps, to law, modernity moves from law to rights to regulation to behavior, hoping that legislation from above can substitute for a culture of belonging that dies from within. This reversal is itself one clear expression of contra-actuality: the substitution of abstract legal form for a living relation that abstraction can describe but never truly replace.
A Qualified Defence of Rights, Properly Situated
None of this amounts to a case for abandoning the rights of nature movement outright. In a world where courts, corporations, and governments overwhelmingly operate through legal frameworks inherited from the European Enlightenment, rights can function as a genuine, if limited, stop-gap defensive strategy. As indicated earlier, they have already been invoked successfully to protect specific rivers, forests, and ecosystems from immediate harm in several jurisdictions, and as a legal innovation they may buy crucial time, slowing destruction and opening political space within which deeper ecological recovery might take root autonomously and alongside.
The real question is not whether rights can be useful, but whether they are mistaken about their own significance. If the rights of nature are presented as the foundation of an ecological civilization — as though the crisis will ultimately be resolved once enough legal personhood has been distributed to enough rivers — then the critique developed here has considerable force. As argued earlier, such an approach leaves untouched the deeper alienation: the fractured relationship between humans and the earth, between humans and one another, and between humans and the sacred, which Panikkar identified as the true source of the crisis. A civilization that continues to view the world primarily through the lenses of abstraction, management, and exchange will, in time, absorb even the language of rights into those same patterns — turning legal personhood, too, into just another category to be managed, litigated, and eventually priced, bought and sold. Given the remorseless manner in which living power structures work in the modern world today, there is every reason to believe that such legal rights assigned to natural entities will be overridden every time someone has enough money to compensate the ‘losers’ from a bargain. That is indeed how economists think!
If, on the other hand, rights are understood as provisional juridical safeguards — useful within institutions that as yet know no richer language for expressing the ecological value of the (ontological) Whole — then they need not be dismissed. They may serve as a bridge, buying time while a more profound cultural and ecological transformation slowly takes root alongside and elsewhere. (But does reality ever unfold like this? Is it not more likely that there are even more powerful transformations emanating from the competitive geopolitics of the day that drive the global market towards financializing and monetizing every right, in the end crushing any possibility of genuine, wholesome ecological restoration?)
It is entirely true that across the world, indigenous cultures, rooted in nature and an ontology of the ecological integrity of the Whole, have been helpfully using the language of rights, duly modified and adapted to collective concerns, to defend their communities and cosmologies, with occasional success. This can only be lauded, whether in the case of the Maoris, since 2017, keeping to their Kawa (value-based, indigenous law) to defend the Whanganui River in New Zealand or the Navajos using the language of US Federal Law, while keeping to their cosmology of K’e to protect their grazing lands in North America, or so many other similar cases. But it is only fair to observe that they have had to take recourse to the imperial language of rights to highlight their concerns. Allowed true ecological freedom, their own ways of resolution of such matters may typically be very different, rooted in radically different ontologies (for instance of Pachemama, or Mother Earth, notions meaningless in most modern courts of law) from the denatured one the modern world is founded upon.5
Note: This is the first of a two-part essay. Read the second part here.
Aseem Shrivastava is a Delhi-based writer, teacher and ecological thinker. He is the author of ‘The Grammar of Greed: Reflections on a Fatal Ecology’ (Red River Books, New Delhi, 2025) and (with Ashish Kothari) of ‘Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India’ (Penguin Viking, New Delhi, 2012). He has spoken and written extensively on ecological issues connected with development and globalisation.
Footnotes
- “Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River: collaboration and pluralism in implementing the Te Awa Tupua Act”, Miriama Cribb, Elizabeth Macpherson, and Axel Borchgrevink, International Journal of Human Rights, February 2024. ↩︎
- Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being, Orbis Books, NY, 2010, p. 355 ↩︎
- Martin Buber, I and Thou, Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970. ↩︎
- Mary Midgley, “Is a Dolphin a Person?” In Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems in Philosophical Plumbing, Routledge, London, 1996. ↩︎
- “Kawa is a response to the long-standing imposition of other people’s values and drivers in how the Whanganui River is to be governed and managed (for example under the RMA), which has failed to recognise Indigenous values, law, rights, interests and tenures. This continual process of decolonising both nature and peoples, is not just about replacing one dominant discourse (non-Indigenous) with control for another (Indigenous), but rather allowing Indigenous people to engage and reconnect with their own knowledge systems. In doing so, Whanganui Iwi through the creation and elevation of kawa, encourage us all to fundamentally change how we see and therefore treat the river, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems. For that reason, the Whanganui model should be understood as an Indigenous law model, recognising Indigenous authority and Indigenous Rights, rather than a model for Rights of Nature. The Whanganui model has the potential to be transformational, enabling a paradigm shift away from the RMA’s management model towards something that is both old and new. Furthermore, it is an Indigenous sharing model by virtue of the fact that through relationality, abundance, working together, putting the river first, and bringing a whole community in conversation with the river, the Whanganui model benefits us all.” “Beyond legal personhood for the Whanganui River: collaboration and pluralism in implementing the Te Awa Tupua Act”, Miriama Cribb, Elizabeth Macpherson, and Axel Borchgrevink, International Journal of Human Rights, February 2024. ↩︎