We are all Earth

Why we must all become Earth lawyers, enjoy the dance of freedom and embrace open-pollinated futures

Rights of Nature: The Future we Want1

In international political fora, rights of nature are introduced in a patchy way, here and there. Reference is made to Pacha Mama, Mother Earth, for example, in the constitution of Ecuador, in a universal declaration in Bolivia. River Rights were introduced in Ecuador, Colombia, New Zealand and India, as well as in Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mexico, in California and the Great Lakes in the US. The 4^th^ International Rights of Nature Tribunal in Bonn, 2017 looked at Earth jurisdiction; working with Earth lawyers who seek to empower Nature and thereby empowering communities.2

The recognition of the Rights of Nature originates mostly and stems from indigenous peoples struggle for their livelihoods. As custodians of biodiversity they understand the ecosystems they depend on. Indigenous peoples identity is built on enlarged boundaries, recognising the rights of plants, of land, rivers and the mountains. They embody the knowledge of their ecosystems. Their struggles for their ancestrys land are clearsighted and foresighted, fighting over the means of habitable soils, halting the decline of ecosystems, and sustaining natures reproductive rights.3

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Indigenous people know what it means to live on devastated land, on the ruins of capitalism. The international Earth Tribunals invite us to listen to the suffering of those who know the world progress has left us .4

The killing of the custodians

Land environmental rights defenders are threatened and killed in ever higher numbers.5 Whilst custodians of biodiversity and open pollinated futures6 suffer, the modern industrial machinery continues to homogenise and annul the reproductive powers and fertility of nature.

Open-pollinated plant varieties are genetically diverse and remain reproducible on the other. They are bred in-situ (in their natural habitat), and often protected by sui generis laws that allow for open-pollination by insects. Whereas industrial seed companies offer uniform varieties that are registered in national catalogues and protected by intellectual property rights (plant variety protection, or patents). Hybrid seeds are non-reproducible yet generate higher yields, They are bred to comply with distinct, uniform, stable (DUS) criteria, a pre-condition to be sold on the market.7

The stakes are high. The EU seed market is valued at about 8 billion Euro. The EU is the largest seed exporter worldwide in a highly competitive market.8

Enclosure

Anna Tsing (2015) calls the Anthropocene9 the plantationopocene, a false universality. She narrates our relation to nature back to the establishment of plantation agriculture (sugar, tobacco, cotton) in the 17th-18th century that led to the establishment of slavery. Rather than waiting for seeds to germ and for seedlings to grow, reproduction on plantations was reinvented: by scaling the crafting of dwarves plants in the soil, by tossing fertiliser and pesticides at it; to which in turn they react by panic growth. Tsing characterises this innovation as plants reproduced under coerced (slave) labour. In response soil fungi transformed when fungicide use in plantations lead to newly created virulent varieties and pests became resistant to microbes. Tsing concludes that plantation farms have shaped our modern relationship of human and plants and animals and nature, now perceived as natural. By now we are disciplined or colonised by plantation farms.

Radical analysis and local gravity fields

To revisit our relation to the rights of nature, radical analysis can help. Radical comes from rac-ine, being rooted, related and belonging to a site, a land. To be rooted is to be resilient, is to be prepared, to not be corrupted nor hijacked, to not be bought up. Radical analysis can help to understand that open futures depend on adherence to nature, to organic matter and genetic diversity.

According to sciences, the physical connection to a local gravity field is a given. Kuhlmann, a philosopher and physicist, says that without a body, organic matter cannot form chemical compounds. Without a form, carbon and organic matter cannot adhere and no biochemical connections can be made. Kuhlmann believes that the basic constituents of the world are neither particles nor fields, but certain structures or bundles of properties that cannot exist independently of body and form.10

Indigenous people know that without land, they are no more. They know their livelihoods depend on the adherence to a body, an ecosystem where a structure or a bundle of specific properties of plant soil microbiota interaction exists that continues to generate habitats for different life forms. Jonathan Horowitz, a shaman teacher, reminds us that We are all indigenous to the Earth. We are Earth.11

Critical Zones and Terrestrial site

Bruno Latour, a French philosopher of science, offers a radical analysis of the history of modernity and its tragic disconnection from Earth. Modernity has deprived nature of all its rights, whence we ventured into voluntarily and aggressively destroying our habitable space, our terrestrial site heading for the universe, for Mars.12

Critical Zone is a recent exhibition curated by Latour. The prologue to the catalogue fabulates: You want me to land on Earth? Why? - Because you are hanging in midair, headed for crash. - How is it down there? - Pretty tense. - A war zone? - Close: a Critical Zone, a few kilometers thick, where everything happens.... The Critical Zone is a 12 kilometers stretch below and above the ground where life is regenerated by way of weathering, water cycles, carbon and nitrogen cycles, eutrophication, soil biology, atmospheric circulation of air, etc. Whether we will survive in the Critical Zone and become part of its regenerative or destructive processes depends on our politics and chosen sciences.13As Tsing and others argue the impact of human made industrial progress and its plantation agriculture is the beginning of the Anthropocene that has proven deadly to life on Earth and its atmosphere.

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The Critical Zone is the matter, where structures or bundles of properties occur. The Earth is the body to which we humans intrinsically belong. Gravity is the form to which we adhere. We must all become Earth lawyers.

Endless variations of forms

Plants are essential matter to habitable zones on Earth. Plants dance with their environment adapting in step with it and modifying it, by cooling the air, changing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration providing oxygen, making soil and by altering the relative abundance of biotic components. Open pollination by insects, birds, wind and other natural mechanism is the basis of all life forms. Spontaneous open and free sexual reproduction is what allows plants for a wild dance of an endless variation in form, music and the degree of complexity in their relationship with animals. (Ingrenouille 2006).14

Thinking like a plant, Graig Heldrege (2013) suggests we could become aware of how we place -- or better, how we plant our ideas and actions in-situ, into concrete situations in life.15

Resisting the machine

Shoshana Zuboff (2019) analyses how, unnoticed, the machine has taken over. She demonstrates how Google, Youtube & Co are about to conquer the idea of what is real. However, they are only dealing with levels of simulation of matter. They are just uploading space, a street, simulating a sensor-projected traffic jam that may not be real when checking the location on site.16Zuboff calls us to push aside the algorithms that discipline and colonise our bodies, our futures, the land we are living on. Zuboff persuades us to join the struggle to halt disruptive practices that foreclose the future we want. What happens when they come for my truth my body, my desires, my indigenous land uninvited and determined to march through my self, taking the bits and pieces that can nourish their machines to reach their objectives? Cornered in my self, there is no escape. ... If life is a wild horse, then the digital assistant is one more means by which that horse is to be broken by renditions. Unruly life is brought to heel, rendered as behavioural data and reimagined as a territory for browsing, searching, knowing, and modifying.17

Cultivating radical analysis, invigorating the spirit of freedom and resistance can all help to free us from plantationopocene and its new disciplines and colonisation.

Unruly dance of freedom

Hannah Arendt reminds us that all beginnings contain an element of unique arbitrariness, related to natality as the accidental condition of our birth. The meetings of our parents, our grandparents, and progenitors are contingent or coincided events having no necessary cause. That contingency is our price for being free, for being able to experience freedom as beginning. The most important question is whether or not our freedom pleases us, whether or not we are willing to pay its price.18

Arendts idea of new beginnings paves the way for new potential forms of human agency; opposing the notion of rendering human beings passive or superfluous. As demonstrated by Earth lawyers, we can start pleading the case. We can become custodians of the rights of nature. We can peel the algorithm sealing film off that mediates our interactions with the Other, the body, the Earth. We can embrace the open-pollinated futures we want. We can adhere to the power of bonding19 and actualise our capacity for freedom. We can become homo situs 20 and resist the homo imitates.

  1. Title of outcome document of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio de Janeiro, July 2012, see https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/66/288&Lang=E ↩

  2. Fourth International (Earth) Tribunal for the Rights of Nature, held at the COP23, November 2017, Bonn, see https://www.earthjurist.org/new-blog/tag/COP23 UN Resolution on Harmony with Nature, December 2020, see https://undocs.org/en/A/RES/75/220 ↩

  3. See OHCHR Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People. See EP Resolution on Violence of rights of indigenous peoples in the world, 3 July 2018, Strasbourg. See CLARA (October 2018) Missing Pathways to 1.5 ºC: The role of the land sector in ambitious climate action. Climate ambition that safeguards land rights, biodiversity and food sovereignty. Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (see LINK). ↩

  4. Tsing Lowenhaupt, Anna (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. ↩

  5. See endnote iii. See Global Witness (2020) Annual report reveals highest numbers of land and environmental rights defenders on record killed in a single year, with 212 people killed in 2019 for peacefully defending their homes and standing up to the destruction of nature (see LINK). ↩

  6. Open pollinated futures: term used in this essay; refers to sexual reproduction of plants produced by seeds that have resulted from natural pollination of their parent plants. Open pollination occurs by insect, bird, wind, humans or other natural mechanism resulting in more genetically diverse plants. Whereas hybrid pollination is a type of controlled pollination in which the seeds come from a different species (i.e. heter-o-sis: modification, deviation, increased performance). ↩

  7. Ulmer, Karin (2020) Seed Markets for Agroecology, published by actalliance.eu (see LINK). ↩

  8. See www.euroseeds.eu ↩

  9. Popular theory of an epoch starting with the industrial revolution. The National Geographic, Resource Library says: The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earths history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planets climate and ecosystem (see LINK). ↩

  10. Kuhlmann, Meinhard (2015) Was ist real? Quantenfeldtheorie. Article in Spektrum Wissenschaft 1/15, p16-23. ↩

  11. See www.shamanism.dk Daphne Miller, M.D (2019) Uncovering how microbes in the soil influence our health and our food. ↩

  12. Latour, Bruno (2021) Ou suis je? Latour, Bruno (2017) Ou atterrir -- comment sorienter en politique? Latour, Bruno (2015) Face a Gaïa. Anders, Günther (1966) Wir Eichmannsöhne. After the experience of the mass killings by the Nazis, Anders talks about the Weltmaschine, a technical-totalitarian state towards which we are drifting: The world becomes a machine. The world as a machine. ↩

  13. Latour, Bruno and Weibel, Peter (2020) Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, quote from cover of the catalogue. Exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe, Zentrum fűr Kunst und Medien, www.zkm.de . ↩

  14. Ingrenouille and Eddi (2006) Plant Diversity and Evolution, see page xiii-preface. ↩

  15. Heldrege, Graig (2013) Thinking like a plant, page 171ff. ↩

  16. Zuboff, Shoshana (2019) Surveillance Capitalism. In February 2020, Simon Weckert, a Berlin-based artist uses 99 phones to trick Google into traffic jam alert. Google Maps diverts road users after mistaken cartload of phones for huge traffic cluster (see LINK). ↩

  17. Zuboff, S. (2019: page 268, 290, 444). ↩

  18. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) Denken ohne Geländer. Quoted in: Canovan, Margaret (1994) Hannah Arendt: A reinterpretation of her political thoughts. ↩

  19. The power of bonding: see own drawing/sketch of glycogen molecule; sometimes thousands of atoms fuse to form giant molecules that form branched chains -- composed of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen atoms. ↩

  20. Bundle of properties adhering to a body or form: see image of a quantum physical collision processes; depending on the mass and charge of the particles, their tracks in an external magnetic field are compressed to different degrees according to images of European Bubble Chamber-CERN; (taken from Kuhlmann article, see endnote x). ↩