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amondyyl OP t1_irr1x7z wrote

Reply to comment by Fatesurge in Bruno Latour Tracks Down Gaia: "Such a world has nothing to do with ecology, but quite simply with a politics of living things". An essay by Latour in which he discusses the work of the Gaia theorist James Lovelock. Bruno Latour (1947-2022) was a French philosopher and sociologist of science. by amondyyl

I can give you just a short and partial answer (maybe someone else can continue or you can check some of the articles that I linked).

One basic point of Latour is that we should think about social relations, artificial objects and natural things as a part of the same network. He thinks that this insight should have concrete political consequences. Nature should be represented in the political process. I believe he proposes a different way of thinking about relations between humans and their environment, and also new political arrangements in which scientific knowledge of nature and climate change would play a bigger role.

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No_Tank9025 t1_irr5lq9 wrote

Haven’t had coffee, yet…. But imagine if we extend the model that “corporations are people” to “nature”?

Giving mama nature “legal standing”, as it were….

(Sorry… American, here…. I’ve always wanted to put forth the legal argument that if “corporations are people”, then the owners are literally slaveholders, because corporations cannot make decisions, only the humans who own them can.)

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the_enfant_terrible t1_irrc53a wrote

Corporations are legal fictions, illusions. Nature (which we are inseparably part of) exists in actuality. Not sure what you intend for us to imagine from your provocation.

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No_Tank9025 t1_irrcq7h wrote

Not intended as provocation.

Intended as a potential legal argument, to enable legal action and legislation to protect the planet.

One of the major issues with taking polluters to court is the issue of “standing”.

Corporations have “standing”, where individuals opposing their practices do not.

If the argument used in court to make corporations “people”, a decision with which I strongly disagree, for several reasons, could be used to make Nature” a “person”… it would be interesting.

Please do not be offended.

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SwampR t1_irsemfs wrote

A couple of thoughts loosely inspired by this comment:

Corporations are legal fictions, perhaps, but that doesn’t make them not exist in actuality. If it did, we wouldn’t have to worry about the very real power corporations have over our lives, the environment, etc…. But alas, we do have to worry.

Nature is also a fiction in important ways. It relies on a human-imagined binary between (1) things that humans do (like corporations) which we consider unnatural, or not natural, and (2) pretty much everything else. All the different things, forces, etc… in the latter category gets lumped together under the singular “Nature” as if it were a single thing.

But of course Nature it isn’t a single thing. And the very binary that the concept relies on starts to fall apart when we acknowledge (as you rightfully did) that we are “inseparably part of” Nature.

b/c Nature isn’t one thing, it makes little sense to me to imagine giving Nature rights as such. But the idea of giving specific ecosystems (like a body of water, for example) legal rights akin to those of corporations is an interesting environmental strategy. But in that case, the body of water as legal person would also be a legal fiction. But then again so would you or I, as legal persons with legal rights. At that point, perhaps, calling legal distinctions fictions obscures more than it reveals.

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