The Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe in the summer term 2023 aim to bring together activists, indigenous peoples, practitioners, and scientists in a critical dialogue between the advocates and adversaries of Rights of Nature (RoN). The events will shed light on different topic areas, such as constitutional reforms, forest protection, global political transformation, and moral implications reflecting on the potentials and pitfalls of RoN for sustainable transformations. The series of dialogues is organized by Junior-Pprofessor Dr. Riccarda Flemmer and seeks to create a space for dialogue, mutual learning, and conjoint knowledge-production between the Global North and South.

Biocentric vs. Anthropocentric law-making
In the third knowledge dialogue focus was set on the rights of forests. On 6th July 2023, Riccarda Flemmer opened the event by presenting the “International Rights of Nature Tribunal” as a civil forum where e.g. the rights of Amazonia have been claimed with the goal to put pressure on governments and prosecute violations of the RoN violations. She also outlined the cases listed by the Eco Jurisprudence Monitor about forests. The 17 listed cases are diverse in terms of their geographical location (1 Benin, 1 Canada, 8 Ecuador, 1 India, 1 New Zealand, 1 US, and 3 International) as well as in their biocentric or anthropocentric argumentations. Historically, claims for the legal standing of forests can be traced back to legal writings by US lawyer Christopher Stone’s “Should Trees have standing” and the dissent of Supreme Court Justice Douglas to the ruling Sierra Club v. Morton concerning parts of the Sequoia National Forest in 1972. Beginning in the 2010s, several forests were recognized then as “legal subjects”, e.g. the Te Urewera forest in Aotearoa/New Zealand 2017. In Latin America, the Colombian Supreme Court of Justice in a 2018 case declared the Colombian Amazonia a “legal entity subject to rights” in response to a climate litigation case articulated by young Columbians for their right to have a future. In Europe, the EU decided in the 2020 Resolution on Reversing Deforestation (P9_TA(2020)0285) about the protection of forests in order to restore their biodiversity and articulated that “ancient and primary forests should be considered and protected as global commons and that their ecosystems should be granted a legal status.” Worldwide the highest number of forest rights cases are located in Ecuador. On the one hand, these comprise indigenous claims for the national and international recognition of kawsak sacha (living forest in Kichwa) as a living and conscious entity with rights and intrinsic value. On the other hand, Ecuadorian courts recently ruled in favor of forests and stopped mining projects, for example in the “Los Cedros” case 2021. 

Los Cedros - How could a forest stop a mine?
Elisa Levy from the OMASNE “Observatorio Minero, Ambiental y Social del Norte de Ecuador” (Observatory for mining, environment and social of Northern Ecuador) connected the case of Los Cedros in Ecuador with forests worldwide. She explained that it is necessary to protect forests because they are essential for the planet’s climate and for providing humans with ecosystem services (ESS). For instance, forests serve as water source and guarantee stable rain for the farmers in the Northern regions of Ecuador, who do not have irrigation systems. She summarized, ‘The bigger the forest, the better the ecosystem services it can provide’. Despite Ecuador’s adoption of RoN in their 2008 constitution, there have been guaranteed several mining concessions in or around the country’s highly biodiverse forests. One of the recent campaigns of OMASNE together with communities, scientists and other allies is the Los Cedros case. After five years of sustained protest and litigation, Los Cedros was finally recognized by the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court to have legal subjecthood including the right to exist with all its species and the right to maintain its cycles of life, structures, functions, and evolutionary process in 2021. Although the case set an important precedent, the Court does not always decide in favor of RoN in new cases.

Practices of forest-making – what can we learn from Amazonian women and kawsak sacha, the living forest?
Dr. Andrea Sempertegui, Assistant Professor in Politics at Whitman College presented parts of her research on Amazonian women’s practice of forest-making in Ecuador. In October 2013, women from different Amazonian indigenous peoples conducted the “March for life” walking from the lowland rainforest to the country’s capital Quito in the Andes in order to fight for the continuity of their way of life according to the principles of sumak kawsay (good living) and kawsak sacha (living forest). The living forest should be understood as a form of relationship which is not about conservation, but about interrelatedness between humans and non-human beings and highlights the acts of working for the continuation of the existence of nature. It is based on an egalitarian relationship. In this march and in the following protest activities, practices of engaging with the forest, e.g. chants and rituals, were performed in political arenas outside of the communities creating space to make coexistence with the forest known. She warned that despite officially having recognized RoN in its constitution, people and especially indigenous women need to fight for the recognition of understandings of living with nature. Though, it is important to highlight that  all communities have their own terms and framings. They actively decided to combine their struggles using the Kichwa terms not to describe one single way of life but a plurality.

Culture is nature, Science Theater 
Frank Raddatz, director of the "Theatre of the Anthropocene" in Berlin, bridged the gap between theoretical considerations and artistic practice in dealing with RoN and forests. In his plays, he said, everything is different from what we are used to know. A scientist is on the stage to be an actor talking about climate change; trees, rivers, and mountains are brought to life, and the whole audience plays along - to give just a small idea of how a performance can look like. Culture, he says, has a central part in our existence as human beings, and since we humans must see ourselves as part of nature again, culture thus is also something natural. Furthermore, a relation should be built between "hard science" and art. The conditions under which we exist in the age of the Anthropocene can only be understood, if we assume that we can only perceive and grasp nature through our culturally shaped filter. As the Theater of the Anthropocene exemplifies, we need to think in teams and to enter into dialogue between different disciplines. This kind of interactive theater creates a new sensibility, Frank argues, that enables us to imagine the future or alternative futures, in plural. 

Principles over law? Anarchist perspectives on RoN
Ende Gelände Tübingen gave a talk about anarchist perspectives on rights for forests and RoN in general. In their view, responsibility is needed instead of leadership and democracy needs to be understood more radically - as a negotiation of living together without concentrated power but with shared responsibilities. Arguing for responsibility instead of rules, they highlighted that principles would be more important than laws, and that legal proceedings would always be infused and ultimately corrupted by state interests.  They emphasized their main concern is that legislation takes something out of democracy and makes it less accessible and certainly less direct. The fear is that RoN might again only focus on human interests and that including nature into a law only operates as another way of making nature controllable to exploit it for the benefits of a particular elite. However, they support the idea of a forest owning itself and to expropriate nature from private owners. Despite the possible subjecthood, which nature could achieve by legal standing, RoN still operates within the given law system that is based on power hierarchies and exclusion. 

Plenary discussion
In the plenary, the question emerged, how forest-making could be defined and how specifically those practices make the forest come alive while others do not. Andrea explained that “making alive” still entails a subject-object divide between humans and nature. She argued that we need to change our perception towards “doing something” to enable relations and make those tangible. For the anarchist perspective, Ende Gelände was asked, considering their criticism of RoN and legal systems, how their utopia would look and what relationships with forests would this utopia include. The activists explained that they would see RoN based on a biocentric understanding where humans and non-human beings have rights and value. Furthermore, according to their understanding, a system change is necessary because in the current commercial ways of using the earth, there is no space to even think about a future. With the audience, the question was discussed, how to change asymmetric and unjust human-nature relationships. While some emphasized the need to change our way of thinking in order to act differently, others urged that the material reality of economic injustices is the basis for current environmental destruction and climate change, therefore, this would need to change first .

Synergies of knowledge
The speakers agreed that it should be up to those who live in and around a forest to speak for it and make political decisions. The close relation with the forest and sometimes the dependence of human livelihoods would provide experiences on how the future of living with the forest should look. The idea of kawsak sacha would be a helpful tool to understand that forests are living entities and that humans need to know about as well as to acknowledge the flows in ecosystems, lifecycles, and regenerative systems. Humans and forests are connected, we can feel the relation with and the life of the forest if we let ourselves do so. Science can also play a role in knowing more about these relations. This, it will be essential to steer aways from the Global North’s human-centered law and policy making moving towards more respectful human-nature relations .  
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Further questions to be discussed:

• Who can speak for a forest and why?
• Who is in charge? Should the state provide RoN or do we need more civil society pressure to protect nature and make authorities respect RoN?
• How to create new sensibility in society towards egalitarian relationships between humans and non-human beings?
• How do we achieve shared responsibility?
• What is the role of science to achieve RoN?

For more information about the series: "Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe about Rights of Nature" click here. 

The Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe in the summer term 2023 aim to bring together activists, indigenous peoples, practitioners and scientists in a critical dialogue between the advocates and adversaries of Rights of Nature (RoN). The events will shed light on different topic areas, such as constitutional reforms, forest protection, global political transformation, and moral implications reflecting on the potentials and pitfalls of RoN for sustainable transformations. The series of dialogues is organized by Juniorprofessor Dr. Riccarda Flemmer and seeks to create a space for dialogue, mutual learning, and conjoint knowledge-production between the Global North and South.

Thinking like a mountain?
The second event in the Knowledge Dialogues series about Rights of Nature explored the rights of mountains. On 15th June 2023, Riccarda Flemmer opened the event with Aldo Leopold’s (1949: 129) phrase “thinking like a mountain” and reflections about deep ecology. The thinking of deep ecology highlights that everything – human and non-human – is connected and does not distinguish between “life” and “lifeless” nature. Referring to the EcoJurisprudence Monitor, Riccarda showed the three listed cases relating to mountains. The milestone RoN case is Mount Taranaki in Aotearoa, New Zealand, who was given “legal personality” in the process of treaty settlements and reconciliation in 2017. In contrast, in 2022, a stewardship authority was established for mountain Manua Kea in Hawaii but this is not a RoN case, because Manua Kea is not recognized to have its own rights but is protected as a sacred place for humans. Neither a RoN case – yet – is the struggle of the Indigenous U’wa people in Colombia, who fight to protect their ancestral territory including the sacred Montaña Zizuma from extractive industries and bad state practices. Drawing on these insights from Indigenous struggles, questions emerge how far a similar approach can be transferred and thinkable in Europe e.g. assigning legal personhood to the Alps.

Indigenous conceptualization for a human-nature relationship of respect
Tata Leo, authority of the original communities of the Yampara Nation, Bolivia, and funding member of the Fundación Cultural Ayllu Tarabucomanta (Foundation for our future - for our planet) shared the kausayninchej, nuestra Vida or our life, from an Andean cosmology. He shared his prevailing shock of traveling to Machu Picchu, an Inca site in the Peruvian Andes, as an Indigenous person and being denied access because of his traditional clothing. Drawing on this experience, he explained that his main preoccupation for the future is the lack of respect for nature in Western society and academic knowledge production. As an alternative, he supports Indigenous concepts such as “pachamama”. However, at the same time, he alerted us that the translation of Indigenous concepts into Western discourses and legal language changes the meaning and understandings get lost in Western thinking patterns. According to him, pachamama is often wrongly or narrowly translated to “mother nature” while in the original Andean cosmology it means the connectedness of all beings, that all is “one”. He concluded that specific rights for nature are not necessary, because all beings are one.

Philosopher Matthias Kramm from Wageningen University and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México conducts research on RoN and Indigenous ontologies. He emphasized that he is not Indigenous himself but has learned from his engagement with Indigenous communities in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Mexico. He compared the Andean and Māori ontologies and explained how the struggle of the Māori led to the recognition of legal personhood for the Whanganui river, Te Urewera forest, and the Taranaki nature in 2017. He also highlighted the fusion of Indigenous and Western thought leading to notions of pachamama and buen vivir in the constitutions and laws of Ecuador and Bolivia. He criticized that not all relevant aspects of Indigenous ontologies can be captured by legal personhood, such as spirits. The notion of personhood itself is human-centered and biased building on the colonial history of rights-based conceptions and notions of property. Further, one single ecocentric paradigm cannot capture the diversity of Indigenous ontologies. The process of abstraction might lead to the opposite, creating a single dominant discourse instead of emancipating the plurality of ontologies.

Photographer and movie director Rodrigo Otero Heraud from Peru, who is currently showing his exhibition “Apu- Retratos de Montañas Sagradas del Perú“ in the Schloss Hohentübingen until the end of September, explained his relation and engagement with nature during the process of taking pictures. Coming from a deep love for nature, it is essential for him to communicate with the mountains. He does not differentiate between him as a subject going into nature but describes his hikes as an equal encounter with the mountains. They observe him as much as he observes them. Thus, he actively asks for allowance to take photos. Rodrigo sees his communication with the mountains as a mental state of “guaca”. Guaca means a place not in geographical terms, but as a mental position, often used to describe places of worship. Lastly, he warned us about the destructive impacts of mining and other industrial activities, which are harming the mountains and promoted a relationship of mutual respect.

Plenary discussion
In the discussion, on the one hand participants raised the idea that RoN would not be necessary if humans encounter nature with respect and maturity. On the other hand, emphasis was set that RoN are necessary for humans to learn respect, particularly in Global North countries, such as Germany. Law would keep us humans accountable for not destroying nature and our future. Referring to the kind of RoN needed, participants emphasized that nature would need the right to an uninterrupted evolution. Connecting the rights of mountains with the idea of individual freedoms and their limitations in German or EU law, this would mean that each human would need to limit destructive behavior and respect the mountain's freedom to uninterrupted natural processes.

Synergies of knowledge
Leo and Rodrigo both argued for a relationship between human and non-human nature based on respect. All speakers agreed that the contextualization of RoN is essential and to shed light on power asymmetries as well as the plurality of voices behind RoN. The controversy, especially regarding the potential danger of circumventing Indigenous rights when implementing RoN and the twist of turning RoN into another weapon of Western legality against Indigenous peoples, is dangerous. The crucial role of Indigenous knowledges in re-thinking Western anthropocentric human-nature relationships remains an ongoing challenge.

Further questions to be discussed:

• If a mountain has the right to undisturbed natural processes, what would this mean in practice?
• Which human representatives should be allowed to speak for mountains, and which should not? Humans need to protect mountains from destruction by humans, especially mining projects.
• Some knowledge and connections get lost in translation. How can concepts, ideas, connections travel?
• How do we deal with competitions between Rights of Nature vs. Rights for Indigenous Communities?
• How can we think of non-human entities, especially "lifeless" nature, in RoN?

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For more information about the series: "Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe about Rights of Nature" click here. 

We had two days of an amazing workshop with fantastic and highly committed scholars from different disciplinary, geographic and academic career backgrounds.

The longstanding critique of white, European savior complex and of ethnographies colonial roots was acknowledged as a heavy burden.

Thinking about the question, what emancipatory research means, resulted in discussions about the multiple types of power asymmetries that our research wants to address, but that also shape our research in its structure, relations and results. While we came to the conclusion that engaging in progressive politics requires researchers' humbleness and good ethical practices in order to open spaces for imagination.

Therefore, engaging in emancipatory research is a constant struggle with not reproducing power asymmetries but to help transform those asymmetries on a personal, academic and societal level.

It has been a wonderful experience of mutual learning! Thank you!

The Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe in the summer term 2023 aim to bring together activists, indigenous peoples, practitioners and scientists in a critical dialogue between the advocates and adversaries of Rights of Nature (RoN). The events will shed light on different topic areas, such as constitutional reforms, forest protection, global political transformation, and moral implications reflecting on the potentials and pitfalls of RoN for sustainable transformations. The series of dialogues is organized by Juniorprofessor Dr. Riccarda Flemmer and seeks to create a space for dialogue, mutual learning, and conjoint knowledge-production between the Global North and South.

Keynote: Series opening by Alberto Acosta
On 4th May 2023 the series “Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe:  was inaugurated at the University of Tübingen. After a warm welcome by Riccarda, Dr. Alberto Acosta, Ecuadorian economist, politician, author, and activist opened the event with a talk about the origins of the RoN. Alberto is one of the fathers of the Latin American movement for RoN and his Presidency of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Assembly in the first constitution worldwide recognizing the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth. In his talk, he explained that RoN are rooted in indigenous cosmovision but also speak directly to Western philosophical ideas of sustainability by Hans Carl von Carlowitz and Alexander Humboldt or concepts of legal personhood by Christopher Stone from the 1970s. He emphasized the biocentric ethics underlying RoN: Nature gives rights to humans, and not the other way around. This way of thinking would bear the potential for fundamental change in the logics of rights and politics, and may bring a new era of civilization. However, knowing first hand how difficult it can be to accept new rights, he argued that historically it has always been a struggle to give rights to previously unrecognized groups or entities.

Dialogue on the Rights of Water-Ríos-Lagunas-Gewässer
Riccarda opened the dialogue with a brief overview of the current state of the rights of waters around the globe. She used the open-access database of the EcoJurisprudence Monitor (EJ Monitor), a mapping produced by a group of researchers -  Craig Kauffman, Shrishtee Bajpai, Kelsey Leonard, Elizabeth Macpherson, Pamela Martin, Alessandro Pelizzon, Alex Putzer, and Linda Sheehan - to show the current state of RoN initiatives. The EJ Monitor includes around 500 EJ initiatives with approx. 400 RoN cases and about 100 related to water. As milestone cases she highlighted the recognition of the Vilcabamba River in Ecuador in 2011, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa- New Zealand in 2017, and the Río Atrato in Colombia in the same year. She emphasized that also in Europe there is a push for recognizing the rights of watersheds, recently in 2022 the salt water lagoon Mar Menor in Murcía, Spain became the first ecosystem recognized as a legal person in Europe.

People of the River, the Río Atrato case and Afro-colombian Communities
Afro-Colombian activist and sociologist Marylin Machado Mosquera from the Colombian Pacific region Chocó was the first guest to speak about water rights in practice and shared her first hand experiences of fighting for the rights of the Atrato River in Colombia. She gave insights on the relationship local communities have with the river. Following the community's understanding, humans and nature are supposed to be in a relationship of balance. This implies a relational ontology that understands rivers to be relevant not for their instrumental use but because of an emotional connection to them. They are viewed as mother or father because they give life to people. She highlighted the importance of “sentipensar”, thinking-feeling, and Ubuntu to understand how Afro-descendant communities and the river coexist. Marylin emphasized that rights are complementary and that by recognizing the rights of the river, the state did not only recognize a natural entity as a subject of rights, but it also acknowledged the need to secure the health of people and animals of the Chocó region.
Marlyin highlighted that in practice there are a number of issues that are not resolved. She mentioned how the humanitarian crisis report in 2019 showed that the Colombian government needs to follow-up on its promises for action. Furthermore, there is criticism from the local community concerning the state limiting the number of guardians assigned to protect Rio Atrato since all of them would have a close relationship with the river. This reduction of guardians would follow a Western approach. Further, the land rights, especially of the Afro-Colombian communities in the area are not even mentioned by the ruling of the Rio Atrato case.

Healthy rivers, defining and measuring “good ecological status” of rivers in Germany
Crossing the boundaries of disciplines, environmental systems analyst Dr. Jonas Schaper, who specializes in freshwater ecology, introduced with his presentation the way natural sciences understand the “good ecological status” of rivers in Germany. He explained that for a river to be “healthy” or not, a list of symptoms must be defined that are contrasted with a state of reference. This state of reference would define a “healthy” river. As he emphasized, this reference state is not a “natural” good condition because rivers have been highly exposed to human intervention for centuries. Historically, rivers have been straightened and drained, dams have been constructed for flood protection, agriculture, and disease control. These human interventions were clearly motivated by an anthropocentric ethos and modified natural ecosystems for human advantage.For a river to be doing “well”, Jonas emphasized that it would flow all year around, shows a high biodiversity, and has a balanced concentration of minerals and nutrients. However, although he could measure, if a river is “doing well” or not, Jonas also highlighted the ethical dimension of defining what is considered a good status. This ties into ideas included in the concept of One Health that acknowledges the mutual interdependence of human, animal and planetary health together.
Jonas explained that a future challenge for natural and social sciences alike will be how reference states are changing under varied biological and climatic conditions and the effects of passive and active river restoration on ecosystem integrity and services. Who decides what is taken as a reference, what reference is a “good” status and who is allowed to speak for a river remain inherently political questions about river rights.

Plenary discussion
In an open round with the audience, questions were raised on how to translate RoN into areas where the approach is not yet present, about the influence of the new president in Colombia and the role of not-human or animal entities. Alberto highlighted that the engagement of different groups, civil society, academia and politics is essential to lead to a change towards applying RoN. Further, Marylin expressed the high hopes society puts in the new Colombian president but also stressed that it is a whole system operating together and warned not to think one person can change everything. Lastly, Jonas explained that also in natural sciences subscribing oneself to one model or another, deciding to give natural entities an intrinsic value or not is always connected to the way one relates oneself to the system: Thus, relational values become entangled between instrumental values. Lastly, he emphasized that also scientifically it is difficult to find a clear line between what are living and nonliving entities and that the boundaries are always gradual and not discrete.

Synergies of Knowledges: Food for thought
The first knowledge dialogue allowed the audience to get an overview on the current status of RoN in the world and specifically about rights of water bodies. It brought together a variety of experiences from different corners of the world and presented how water and its rights are perceived and protected. Additionally, a bridge from natural to social science was established, seeing the connection and the need for collaboration beyond university to work on the well-being of water bodies and communities worldwide. As Alberto highlighted we need to “find a combination of community experience-based knowledge, emotional ties and ways to measure damages, define indicators, and inform policies.”

Questions on the potentials and limitations of RoN to keep in mind and heart:

• Who gives rights to whom?
• Who speaks for nature? 
• How to construct proactive agendas for RoN and not only react when rights are already violated?
• How can we guarantee RoN as new sets of rights, if human rights and especially indigenous peoples’ rights, communities livelihoods, and territories are not respected?

More information about the series: "Knowledge Dialogues between Latin America and Europe about Rights of Nature" click here.

PLURIVERSUM combines alternative development impulses and information from all over the world with high-quality music and fascinating projections to create an extraordinary multimedia event!
Together with the journalist Sandra Weiss, Alberto Acosta and Grupo Sal the event invites a prominent personality from a different region of the world each evening to present and discuss forward-looking thoughts, ideas and concepts.
The thematic presentations will be musically framed by the Grupo Sal - who embedds the content in an aesthetic context of visual and thematic condensation by the projection artist Johannes Keitel.
The evening covers and discusses sibjects such as: Climate justice, human rights, rights of nature, strengthening civil societies, bearing witness to current conflicts, building bridges between Global South and Global North, new concepts, new perspectives, participation, rights of indigenous peoples, new social movements, disruptive developments. Altogether under the motto: "What urgently needs to be done to change the world and make it more just."
Join us on 5 May 2023 at 19:30 in the Westspitze Saal 1 in Tübingen! More information click here!

Click here to Join us for our South-North Knowledge Dialogue
on 4th May at 6-8pm in Tübingen!
Adress/Dirección: 
Brechtbau Wilhelmstr. 50 72074 Tübingen
Room/Salón: 027
Not in town? E-mail us for online participation via zoom: [email protected]

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We are very happy to present the final report on the workshop "Transformative Potential of Rights of Nature?" which took place in Tübingen, Germany From the 20th to 21st January 2023. It was an amazing experience to hear from and bring together diverse perspectives from the Pacific, Europe and Latin America. We also feel extremely privileged to have had the visual artist Alessandra Zaffiro from Housatonic with us who created graphic protocols as “visual harvests” of our sessions. Please check out the results of this fruitful event in our workshop report which is now available for download

El taller reunió a académicos y activistas indígenas y no indígenas de distintas partes del mundo para hablar de las perspectivas y limitaciones de garantizar los derechos propios de la naturaleza, especialmente a los bosques.