Last year Brian Eno initiated a plan to treat Nature as a revenue partner on streaming music services such as Spotify and Apple Music [Savage 2024]. This grants Nature the same rights as, say, Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar. At that time I drafted a reply on social media. Here I expand the text in the context of the Slovenia 2025 meeting of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies (CENSE). Much more could yet be written from this brief outline, should time and health allow.
The Rights of Nature movement has expanded in recent years with little regard to either efficacy or philosophical rigour. It is certainly appealing at first glance to think that granting Nature “equal rights” with humans might prevent further environmental damage [Tam 2020]. But articles such as those published by Earth.Org make naive assumptions, not the least of which is that granting a river (for example) rights would automatically enable it to compete legally with corporations. After all, it is people that must argue the case, and these representatives require money and power to be successful. Tam can point to a few positive outcomes but a more detailed examination of legal practicalities cast doubts on this being a viable approach [Sachs 2024].
Rather than arguing from the standpoint of practicalities or politics, I will start with Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). Instrumentalising nature is part of the same impulse that allows us to treat the world as a “standing reserve” (Bestand). In technocratic society, entities are produced, stored, used up, and replaced as disposable objects. The standing reserve conceptualises the world (from a phenomenological standpoint) in terms of resources ready to be exploited. Far from contradicting this principle, granting Nature rights extends an anthropocentric framework to encompass the other-than-human. It is a paternalistic gesture to enfold Nature within human legal frameworks.
In the specific case of music production, it’s revealing that Eno’s initiative targets platforms such as Spotify, since these have been designed for the express purpose of extracting every last ounce of excess value from artists. The fixation on revenue in the proposal does not break with the persistent impulse of commodification. But Heidegger warned us that it’s not only the object that is turned into standing reserve, but also the subject. Indeed, it’s clear that artists in the music industry are conceptualised as disposable resources. This is expressed in language itself, as soon as creativity is nominalised (consider the term “creatives”). Vital artistic process is turned into mere content (“deliverables”). Practitioners are labelled in terms of their product, mere “content creators”, an inversion of the actual lived experience. In practice, recording artists are treated as wage slaves by streaming “services”, given ridiculously low rates of compensation [Anon 2024].
Needless to say, I strongly resist the impulse to corporatize every aspect of our lived environment. By accepting in advance that our fight will be on the terrain of The Law, we concede every battle to those vested interests who wield greater power. After all, the entire system has been structured to serve the Empire’s interests, extending extractive capitalism to the standing reserve of the colonies. We can instead take lessons from Native and Aboriginal groups who have insisted that their own governance structures not be subservient to colonial legal systems. This process requires an ontological rethink. Consider the concept of sovereignty, which is to say duty to a sovereign. This was originally used to establish hierarchical control mechanisms, while colonialists used this inclusion/exclusion dichotomy to deny rights to indigenous peoples. More recently, some of the oppressed have chosen to fight for their rights within this system of exploitation. But others have taken a more radical approach, redefining sovereignty to encompass a process of identity-formation and self-determination [Shrinkhal 2021].
We can approach the Rights of Nature similarly. Rather than force the more-than-human to conform within anthropocentric structures, we can instead acknowledge the radical otherness of Nature. This provides figurative (and literal) ground on which we might stand to resist hegemonic forces.
Nature is not a person, not a thing to be paid recompense. Nature has no rights, has no responsibilities, owns nothing. It is not so constrained by human ontologies. Rather, Nature is a wild field of potentialities which reveals itself to us in subtle phenomenal gestures. This is the true source of our duty of care.
References
Anon. 2024. “The streaming royalties controversy: why artists are still fighting for fair pay,” Music Industry Weekly [website], 10 September 2024. access
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. London: Garland Publishing.
Sachs, Noah M. 2024. “A wrong turn with the rights of nature movement,” The Georgetown Environmental Law Review 36.39, 39-84. access
Savage, Mark. 2024. “Nature officially becomes a musician, earning royalties for environmental causes,” BBC [website], 18 April 2024. access
Shrinkhal, Rashwet. 2021. “Indigenous sovereignty and right to self-determination in international law: a critical appraisal,” AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 17.1, 71-82. access
Tam, Claudia. 2020. “Should nature be given legal rights?,” Earth.org [website], 22 October 2020. access
Notes
I have decided to capitalise “Nature” throughout this text, with the explicit recognition that this orthographic choice conforms with a practice of viewing Nature as a singular, unique entity, in much the same way as capitalising “God” implies agency and personhood. Though this is not my intent, I stand my ground on Nature capitalised as a more-than-human field of generative possibility, encompassing both biotic and abiotic flows. Aristotle’s physis is perhaps a more apt term.
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