Plants and the Law: Vegetal Ontologies and the Rights of Nature. a Perspective from Latin America

Abstract

For many Amazonian indigenous communities plants play a central political role within and outside their territories. Vegetal beings are considered a source of knowledge and authority, as well as the origin of law itself. This article addresses the social and legal agency of (vegetal) nonhuman beings in Latin American constitutionalism. I suggest that non-anthropocentric concepts of society, politics, and law should take seriously inter-species encounters, and how they unfold in legal norms, institutions, and practices. In the first section, I briefly discuss the emergence of the so called ‘nonhuman turn’ in the humanities, as well as its influence on what Uruguayan political ecologist Eduardo Gudynas calls the bio-centric turn in Latin American constitutionalism. An expression of this bio-centric turn, Article 71 of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador 2008, grants rights to nature. In the second section, I offer two anthropological readings of this clause. I suggest that non-anthropocentric thinking in Latin American legal theory could help us to redefine concepts such as justice and standing, among others, to better face the environmental challenges of the present. Taking cues from the science of plant sensing and intelligence, I suggest, in the last section, that plants can serve as a sort of prototype of (vegetal) nonhuman agency that fully asserts Amerindian principles of relationality and interdependency between all living and nonliving entities. For this purpose, I will briefly refer to the use of an Amazonian ritual plant in the context of indigenous political and legal concepts.