Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

SwampR t1_irsemfs wrote

Reply to comment by the_enfant_terrible 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

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.

4