Los derechos de la naturaleza: su arquitectura conceptual

Abstract

This article examines the conceptual architecture that gives shape to the rights of nature. To meet this objective, I divide the article into three parts. In the first part, I analyze the conceptual structures that shape three paradigmatic perspectives on the rights of nature: the Ecuadorian, the Bolivian and the New Zealander. In particular, I explore the following categories that constitute the backbone of the rights of nature: (i) juridified autonomous subject; (ii) cultural hybrid; (iii) sacred and eternal; and (iv) space inhabited (and constituted) by a set of interdependent organic and inorganic entities. In the second part of the article, and as a way to understand more clearly and precisely the idea of nature-subject, I analyze the idea of nature-object that emerges paradigmatically with the Bible, especially with the book of Genesis. The creation of the world by the Judeo-Christian divinity, as well as the expulsion of humans from the Garden of Eden, are central elements in the narrative that articulates the idea of nature-object in Western culture. The differences between the concepts of the Judeo-Christian nature-object and the culturally hybrid nature-subject will allow me to characterize and understand in a sharper way the constitutive dimensions of the notion of nature-subject that appears in late modernity. In the third part, I study the concept of nature subject and object as it appears in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Whitman’s work prototypically articulates one of the possible middle ground that exists between nature-object and nature-subject. His poetry offers a concept of nature that is both sacred person and human instrument. Nature in Whitman is anthropomorphized and spiritualized: it is mother and cosmic creative force. However, Whitman also interprets nature as a means to achieve a particular political project: the construction of a modern democracy in the New World.