Aseem Shrivastava
Building on the critique of the rights of nature discourse in part I of this essay, Aseem Shrivastava shows how the rights discourse collapses under scrutiny, (re)producing anthropocentrism ironically at odds with its own goals. He traces a fourfold progression from rights to duties to responsibility to belonging, arguing that law should follow custom and relationship rather than substitute for them. The conclusion calls for moving “from claim to communion”— recovering rootedness, kinship, and cosmic responsibility over legal entitlement, since law can restrain harm but cannot teach belonging to the earth.
The Discourse Inherits the Problem It Tries to Overcome
A further qualification sharpens the critique considerably, and it deserves to be stated with some precision: the rights of nature discourse does not necessarily fail as a juridical instrument. As already noted, the rights language has demonstrable, if limited, protective uses in certain contexts. Also, as mentioned earlier, it becomes philosophically self-defeating specifically when it mistakes a remedial legal device for the foundation of an ecological ethic. The distinction matters, because it locates the failure not in the tool itself but in the metaphysical weight placed upon it. Persisting with the rights approach, unmindful of the philosophical pitfalls, can lead us into exhausting absurdity.
Consider what happens the moment one asserts, simply, “nature has rights.” The sentence cannot survive its own first follow-up question: what, exactly, is nature? Is an individual tree a rights-bearing subject? A forest? A watershed? A river? An ocean? A mountain? A species? An ecosystem? A biome? A bacterial community? A coral reef? An animal? Which animals? A domesticated animal? Birds and fish, rodents and reptiles? Microbes? An insect — a mosquito, even? A crop plant? Where is the line beyond which nature exists without rights? And once some boundary has been drawn, a second question immediately follows: what exactly is the right in question? The right not to be killed? To flourish? To reproduce? To remain within its ecological niche? To evolve? To migrate? Not to be polluted? An endless flurry of questions, tantamount to an orrery of potential errors and cul-de-sacs.
These are not just difficult extreme cases awaiting refinement. Ecosystems or microbiomes are constantly transforming and altering one another: a tiger kills a deer, a fungus attacks a tree, a river erodes a mountain, destructive earthquakes happen, a flood destroys one forest and creates another ecological order in its place. So a further, more troubling question arises — whose right takes precedence when ecological processes exterior to humanity themselves conflict with one another?
The legal apparatus, confronted with this, has no option but to keep manufacturing ever finer distinctions: categories, standing rules, appointed representatives, thresholds, exceptions, balancing tests, expert determinations. The attempt to escape anthropocentrism thus produces, almost inevitably, and with more than a dash of irony, an enormous anthropocentric bureaucracy and judiciary for deciding what the ‘concerned elements’ of the non-human world are entitled to.
This is a genuinely disturbing paradox which probably means that there is a simpler, better way to think about such questions. Ironically, the more earnestly the rights framework tries to honour nature on its own terms, the more it must subordinate nature to distinctly human categories of distinction and adjudication. How did we get ourselves into such a weird position in the first place?
Reassembling What Was First Taken Apart
There is something ontologically revealing in this proliferation of borderline cases, once it is traced back to its origin. Cognitively speaking, modernity first objectified and fragmented the living world into discrete objects — forest into trees, trees into timber, timber into commodities — and only later, having registered the ecological consequences of that fragmentation, attempts to reassemble the pieces through law: forest into legal person, legal person into rights, rights into representation. But notice that the underlying fragmentation is never actually undone. The forest remains something whose legal status we, as external subjects positioned ‘above’, ‘against’ and outside it, must determine. Rights of nature repair the symptom of fragmentation — the forest’s vulnerability before the law — without touching the fragmentation underneath itself.
There is a different way to think. The cosmotheandric perspective begins somewhere else entirely. It does not ask how the forest might qualify for legal personhood. It asks why the forest should have to become a legal person at all before we are willing to recognise that we already belong to and with it. That is the crucial inversion, and it is worth dwelling on, because it changes which question counts as fundamental. Rights-based thinking asks what the river (like a human) possesses. A relational ontology asks instead what constitutes right relationship between human beings and the river within the larger (ecologically integral) Whole of which both are expressions.
Once the question has been reframed in this second way, a great many of the seemingly interminable legal puzzles — does the mosquito have rights, does the virus, does the invasive species — simply cease to occupy the centre of attention. They are all potentially real questions, and thus not necessarily unreal; but because of our chosen perspective, they become secondary, derivative of a prior and more important question about the health of the whole relationship between humanity and the rest of the natural world, rather than about the precise moral status of each of its members. If we understand the Universe as an infinitely stretched web of relationships bound by a common cosmology, it makes little sense to deal with each element in the web as though it was unrelated to its neighbours, or even to distant entities.
Photograph by LingarajGJ via Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Ecological Wisdom Makes the Legal Question Recede in Significance
This cognitive reframing has a striking practical consequence. A society that genuinely internalises its relationship with the living world would find many of these legal dilemmas simply unnecessary. Problems are not so much ‘solved’ as dissolved. We do not have to worry about earthquakes (except taking a few necessary precautions ourselves). Nor need we meddle in the everyday battles between snake and mongoose.
Imagine a community that understands, as a matter of inherited and lived knowledge, where it may build, how much water it may draw and from where, where and when it may fish, what may be allowed to enter the river, where settlements must not be placed, which forests must remain untouched, which species must be protected, how much may be harvested, and what must always be left for regeneration. And all of this with an ontologically necessary humility about the human condition on earth (in the best of all possible worlds, there will be earthquakes and some infants will die before becoming children). Such a community has no real need of a theory settling whether the river “has rights.” The relationship itself generates the norm, and it can do so with a sophistication that the rights framework, for all its apparent precision, rarely matches. Traditional ecological knowledge frequently distinguishes seasonal, spatial, ritual, reproductive, and ecological limits in far more nuanced ways than the blunt binary of “has rights” versus “does not have rights” ever could.
This is a richer ecological grammar, and it suggests a general principle. Ecological wisdom makes many legal questions unnecessary by preventing the situations that generate them in the first place. The forest does not need a right against being felled if the community already recognises that its regenerative rhythm cannot be violated without consequence. The river does not need a right to flow if the community already understands that diverting it destroys the very relational conditions of the community’s own existence. The mountain does not need moral or legal standing in court if blasting it away for stone would already register, within the community’s own sense of order, as an absurdity rather than a permissible transaction.
It is important to understand that central to this discussion are the circumstances of a globally mobile metropolitan modernity in which the protagonists of global capital routinely take remote decisions which uproot and eviscerate communities from their ecological niches and landscapes. Global markets routinely supersede rooted communities with the release of every commercial. Under such conditions of structural ecological alienation, it is all too certain that the ecological wisdom that is being considered here has little chance to take root and flower. Such conditions generate an existential predicament in which the ‘natural world’ is already seen at a distance from ‘civilisation,’ in need of protection via legal instruments like the ‘rights of nature.’
Effort has to be directed then at stalling and reversing the global processes which are generating the conditions in which ecological wisdom is being rendered inert and inoperable. We have to question the sphere over which markets are to be allowed to operate, a danger flagged long ago by the great economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi. 1
Global society in the 21st century needs to take a long, hard look at itself and renew age-old questions concerning the meaning of our place, cosmically speaking, in the scheme of things. Who are we and what are we doing here? Such philosophical questions are no longer a luxury for occupants of the ivory tower. They need to be asked by schoolchildren as much as by their parents, grandparents, and everyone else. Bringing such questions into the mainstream of public discussion is an urgent imperative for the survival of civilised human society.
Two Mirror-Image Framings, One Deeper Problem
It is worth pausing and digressing here on an irony that a qualified defence of rights (see the earlier section that deals with it) brings sharply into focus. Rights of nature and the ecosystem-services framework are often presented as opposites — one insists that nature possesses inherent worth and standing, the other reduces nature to a bundle of utilitarian functions performed for human benefit — and in one sense they clearly are opposed. Yet at a deeper level the two can coexist quite comfortably within the same underlying grammar, because both continue to treat nature as something that must be externally represented and institutionally administered: one by conferring rights upon it, the other by pricing its services. ‘Nature has rights’ and ‘nature provides services’ (akin to ‘humans have rights’, ‘humans provide services’) turn out to be two different answers to the same, already misframed question — namely, what is nature for us, and how should our institutions register that. The cosmotheandric question cuts underneath both: what is our relationship with the forest, within the ecologically integrated Whole of which forest and humanity are both already expressions? That question is not answered by conferring rights, nor by calculating value; it can only be answered by attending to the quality of the relationship itself, something that legal systems cannot do with much success. And it is precisely this relational truth which will ultimately shape our collective destiny, not the statutes that have been put in place to postpone the peril.
Beyond Rights and Duties: A Fourfold Deepening
This suggests that the real alternative to rights may not simply be duties, stated as an equal and opposite corrective. Even duties can remain somewhat anthropocentric if they are understood as rules imposed upon an already-separate human subject, a kind of ledger entry on the other side of the same accounting page as rights. Again, Panikkar’s notion of cosmic responsibility runs deeper than either. Responsibility, on this view, arises because human beings participate in reality; it is closer to an ontological condition than a moral rule. One does not say “I have a duty to breathe” — one breathes because one participates in an atmospheric and biological order that does not ask permission. It simply bids us to breathe. Ecologically aware cosmic responsibility, similarly, begins from the recognition that human existence is constituted through the earth and the elements. It is not merely obligated toward them. Ancient rituals around the elements have always served as reminders of pre-existing relationships in which humanity already exists. They confirm the web of life in human consciousness. Festivals testify to the self-same web.
It becomes possible, then, to trace a fourfold progression, each term reaching further deeper than the one before it. Rights express a legal relation; duties manifest a moral link; responsibility articulates a relational existence; belonging reveals an ontological condition. The movement runs from the most superficial register of the ecological question to its deepest.
This progression also yields a sharper way of stating how institutions ought to be built, and in what order. The modern state characteristically asks, first and almost exclusively, what rule or law should be enacted. An ecosophical civilization would ask, first, what relationship ought to be nurtured. Then, what customs might embody that relationship. This would be followed by the question of what institutions could sustain those customs. And only at the very end, what laws, if any, remain necessary once the rest is in place. The order is effectively reversed from the modern default.
Modernity tends to assume that law itself produces order — that enacting the right statute will, more or less directly, generate the right behaviour. An ecosophical culture would instead understand that law, at its best, merely articulates an order that already exists, embedded in relationships, customs, and ecological limits that precede it. This does not require abolishing law. It requires returning law to what should be its proper, secondary place. It is not the prime mover. It has a supportive role: to nurture pre-existing, but threatened cosmic and ecologically consequential relationships which engage human intelligence and wisdom at their deepest level.
The Three Ecologies and the Cosmotheandric Triad
One further qualification deserves to be drawn out explicitly, because it prevents the argument from collapsing back into a simple opposition between humanity and nature. If the cosmic dimension is treated merely as an object, the result is environmental exploitation. If the human dimension is treated as a wholly autonomous subject, cut loose from any wider whole, the result is human alienation. If the sacred dimension is expelled from the picture altogether, the result is a generalized loss of any deeper meaning to existence. The ecological crisis, seen this way, is not adequately described as ‘humanity versus nature.’ It is more accurately described as the breakdown of the cosmotheandric relationship as such — a simultaneous disturbance across what might be called three ecologies: the cosmic, the cultural, and the psychic or inner ecology of the person. These cannot be healed independently of one another. Since they sustain and reinforce each other, they have to be supported in ways that make this possible.
A person alienated from himself, from other human beings, and from his own community will very readily become alienated from the earth as well. And a civilization organized around limitless accumulation will continue, more or less automatically, to produce people who experience the earth primarily as an external resource, whatever legal protections happen to be on the books. This is why an ecosophical response cannot be a purely environmental program bolted onto an otherwise unchanged civilization. It has to address the psychic and cultural ecologies together with the cosmic one, or it will not hold. Our task is that big.
Expanding the Circle, or Dissolving It?
All of this suggests a more careful, and ultimately stronger, way of stating the overall argument than a flat rejection of rights of nature would allow. The claim is not that rights of nature are simply wrong — that would be too easy to refute, since rights can and occasionally do protect ecosystems effectively in the short term. But this is because we are living through an ecological emergency on the scale of the earth and the elements. The more interesting and more defensible claim is this: the rights-of-nature discourse is a historically understandable juridical response to ecological devastation, but it remains imprisoned within the anthropocentric grammar of modernity precisely when it treats legal personhood as the pathway to ecological belonging. Its deepest limitation is that it asks which entities in nature should receive rights, whereas an ecosophical vision asks what forms of human existence would allow the entire relational web of life to flourish.
Put most sharply: the rights-of-nature movement tries to expand the circle of rights-bearing beings, extending an existing category outward to include more members. An ecosophical vision tries, instead, to dissolve the circle altogether — not by making everything a rights-bearing individual, but by replacing the underlying conception of reality as a collection of discrete individuals standing outside one another with a relational ontology in which such a circle, and the boundary it draws, no longer does the primary work. On this view, the question is no longer whether the river has rights. It becomes: what would it mean for a human community (provided we allow communities to exist!) to live in right relationship with its river? And this second question does not require anyone to settle whether the river, the fish, the reeds, the soil, the microorganisms, and the mountain all possess identical or comparable legal status. It requires, instead, an understanding of the integrated ecology of the Whole — which is a different, and in an important sense more tractable, kind of inquiry. It is a question appropriate to an intellect on the human scale, unlike the question which would have us adjudicate between the rights of sharks and squids, a matter on which we must accept and declare our all-too-human helplessness.
This is also where the old language of ‘living properly’ or ‘treading lightly’ can be given real philosophical weight rather than left as a vague moral injunction. ‘Properly’ does not mean morally perfect. It means fittingly — living on a human scale, in accordance with the rhythms, limits, reciprocity, and regenerative capacities of the living world of which one is a part.
Four questions, arranged in ascending order of depth, help to make the contrast vivid: modernity characteristically asks, what may we do? Law narrows this to, what are we permitted to do? Rights narrow it further still, to, what must others not do to me or the other? Ecosophy — as “the wisdom of the earth” — asks something else again: how shall we live so that the Whole of which we are a part may continue to flourish?2 This last question does not abolish the earlier three. It simply renders a striking number of them secondary, answerable almost as an afterthought once the primary relationship has been set right.
The inference we may draw from the above discussion is that if the language of the rights of nature is deployed, a serious degree of caution is warranted to pre-empt the commodification, financialisation, and further devastation of the natural world by a legally well-organised and aggressive industrial modernity. Eventually, the rights of nature discourse must pave the way for a form of wholesome ecological renewal — cosmic, cultural, and psychic — which would render redundant a whole world of unnecessary legal entanglements.
Conclusion: From Claim to Communion
An aphorism may help to crystallize the distinction this essay has tried to draw out: rights may temporarily protect nature from us, but they cannot teach us how to belong to nature. On the contrary, they might even drive us farther from ‘it.’ And unless we are able to re-learn such belonging, the ecological crisis of the earth will keep intensifying and accelerating. Stated in more explicit terms, as Panikkar might say, the ecological crisis is not, in the end, a crisis of insufficient rights, but a crisis of forgotten participation and cosmic belonging. Law can restrain our industrial violence. But only a recovery of cosmotheandric belonging can heal the rupture from which the violence of the ruling age-old myth of the ‘conquest of nature’ springs. Ultimately, nothing less will do insofar as the reversal of the ecological crisis of the earth is concerned.
A very important reason why so many people take recourse to the juridical structure alone is because the modern metropolitan way of life — entailing rapid global mobility — is invisibly taken for granted, as an inevitable part of the way ahead. If the unsustainable scale of world cities and the accelerating dispersion (through ever more speedy modes of transport and communication) of families and communities is thought of as ‘freedom’ and is not questioned, the rights of nature seems like the logical way to proceed.
However, surely ‘going places’ has left both us and the natural world, ‘out of place’? Is ecological renewal truly possible unless we live lives rooted in the earth, in the midst of living human communities, rather than transiently in metropolitan areas and virtual networks? Politically, passive representation has to give way to active participation. This is only possible by slowing and scaling down. Slowing and scaling down is a sine qua non for ecological regeneration. There is really no other way to recover the necessary rootedness.
The distinctive contribution of an ecosophical critique, then, is not to oppose the language of rights outright, but to situate and contextualise it correctly: it is part of the juridical superstructure of modernity, indispensable perhaps under the extraordinarily frayed human condition of an alienated 21st century global modernity, but incapable of bearing the full responsibility of civilizational renewal, the need of the hour. That renewal must begin at a deeper level, with the recovery of forms of dwelling and dialogue, perception and participation in which the earth is no longer encountered as an external object — even a legally protected one — but as part of the living cosmic web of which human beings are an inseparable part. This is the shift from an ontology of possession to a cosmology of belonging: from claim to communion, from entitlement to participation, from management to dwelling. It is there, in the patient, faithful regeneration and creative renewal of custom, kinship, and cosmic responsibility, rather than in an alienating jurisprudence alone, that an adequate ecosophical response to the ongoing crisis of civilisation must ultimately be grounded.
*****
I wish to thank Alex Jensen, Ashish Kothari, Arjun Bhatia, Pranav Annur, Bettina Baumer, and Sajai Jose for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
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.