Godofredo Stutzin was a Chilean lawyer and conservationist who held, from the early 1970s, that nature should be recognised in law as a subject with rights of its own, and not only as an object or a resource that belongs to people. He proposed that nature as a whole should hold rights such as the right to life and integrity, with a public defender to speak for it in court. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his refusal to treat the living world as property, and holds that such rights only take root where people also regain their felt relationship with the other Peoples.
Who was Godofredo Stutzin? #
A Chilean lawyer and one of the pioneers of the rights of nature. He founded CODEFF, a Chilean national committee for the defence of wild animals and plants, a non-governmental conservation group based in Santiago that has helped create protected areas in Chile, and his proposals for nature’s rights were being put forward in Chile in 1973.1 He set out his case in Spanish at meetings in Jahuel in 1973 and Buenos Aires in 1974, published a shortened version of it in English in 1976, and was still writing on it decades later, for example in the magazine Resurgence in 2002, under the heading that justice requires nature to be recognised as a legal entity.2
He was working on the same idea, at the same time, as the American law professor Christopher Stone, whose essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” (1972) made the case that natural things should have at least the standing in law that corporations have.3 Stutzin cited the dissent of the American judge William O. Douglas in a case over the Mineral King valley in California, which had suggested that a lawsuit could be brought in the name of the natural object about to be destroyed. Stutzin agreed in principle, but preferred nature to be treated as a single legal entity instead of object by object.2
What did he argue? #
That law, as it stood, was built around human beings alone. Under it, natural things were presumed to be worthless and free to be destroyed unless someone proved that keeping them was useful; he wanted that presumption reversed, so that everything in nature would be presumed worth conserving unless a higher interest was shown, and he called for the law’s anthropocentric conception of itself to be overcome. For him the ecological crisis could only be overcome through, in the wiki’s translation from the Spanish, “a radical change of values and of methods”.4
His proposal was that nature should be treated in law as a subject, a holder of rights, and not as an object. He saw nothing strange in this. The law already gives rights to entities that are not human beings, such as the State and anonymous economic and social bodies, whose rights are very real even though their human face is a fiction; so, he asked, what prevents us from treating nature as a holder of rights as well? Nature, as ecology shows, exists as an infinitely complex and structured organisation, and it has an interest of its own, which is to sustain life on Earth.4
Three features of his version stand out. First, the rights he had in mind would belong, as a general rule, not to this tree or that river but to “the universal entity nature” as a whole. Second, they would be rights such as the right to life and the right to integrity, and where nature had been harmed it could demand restoration to the state it was in before or, where that was impossible, fitting compensation for its own benefit, either in kind or in money paid into a fund for the protection of the environment. Third, because nature cannot go to court itself, a public body, a council or ombudsman for the defence of the environment, would act for it, though not alone, since any suitable person could also represent it.4
He did not see nature’s rights as competing with people’s. They do not replace human rights to a healthy and intact environment, in his view, but complement them, though he accepted that real conflicts between the rights of nature and the rights of human persons can arise.4 For him, as one scholar puts it, talking about the worth of nature without a legal form for it was empty talk.5
What has happened to the idea since? #
It has moved from essays into constitutions. In 2008 Ecuador’s constitution gave rights to “Nature, or Pacha Mama”, including respect for its existence and for the renewal of its life cycles; Bolivia passed a law describing Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this as a living system and as sacred; and in 2017 New Zealand recognised the Whanganui River, Te Awa Tupua, as a legal person, with guardians appointed to speak for it. One tracker, launched in 2022, records some 430 rights of nature initiatives across 42 countries.6 Stutzin’s two hallmarks, nature as a whole holding rights and a guardian to speak for it, are both visible in these laws. See What did Cormac Cullinan mean by Earth jurisprudence?
Are the rights of nature criticised? #
Yes, and some of the sharpest criticism comes from people whose own traditions the laws draw on. The researcher Leah Temper warns that bringing Indigenous philosophies into the institutions of the state can lead to “distortion, erasure and co-optation, a new form of epistemic violence”, and some Indigenous communities refuse rights handed to them by a state they see as occupying their land, and instead assert their own responsibilities to the land and their own law.7
Others within Indigenous communities welcome the laws. The Indigenous activist Casey Camp-Horinek, in the United States, said that when the rights of nature were passed into her nation’s tribal law, “for the first time we saw our Indigenous values and rights reflected in Western law. We are not people protecting Nature, we are Nature protecting itself.”7
How does his work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Most directly in what he saw as wrong with the law. When farming emerged, farmers came to see themselves as owning plants and animals; other beings became possessions to be manipulated and used, and as ‘property’ they had no rights.8 Our culture still sees the other-than-human Peoples as lesser, and so as not meriting the same rights as us.9 Stutzin’s call to make nature a subject in law, and not an object, is a lawyer’s challenge to that same story. See What is the myth of human supremacy? and What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
His choice of nature as a whole as the holder of rights also meets the animist picture. In shamanism all beings are part of one interconnected web, individuals as twigs on the branches of a vast tree of life whose great trunk is rooted in Mother Earth; “The Earth is indeed our Mother.”10 For hunter-gatherers everything had its place and its right to exist, and the land belonged to all the PeoplesThe Peoples. The Animal People, Plant People, Standing People (the Trees) and Stone People: our elder kin, of whom the Human People are the youngest and least wise. A family, not a hierarchy. Read the full answer, or rather the Peoples belonged to the land.11 And the laws that followed his work belong to the slow recovery from the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer, alongside the growth of animal welfare and environmental laws over the last few hundred years.12
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In two places. First, on what nature is. Stutzin grounded nature’s claim in its interest in sustaining life on Earth, as an organised whole described by ecology. In shamanism everything is made of energy that is alive and conscious, and the rivers, rocks and mountains are beings with their own consciousness, equal in status to us.13 Seen this way, a river’s rights are not a legal convenience but a recognition of who the river already is.
Second, on how much law can do. Laws to protect the vulnerable and the environment are necessary and wonderful, but hunter-gatherers did not care for the land because a law told them to; they simply would not have harmed it. The relationship was not an idea, a principle or a law but something heartfelt, arising from Soul and Spirit, and outer changes only last when they are planted in a soil of deep inner change.14 Giving a river rights in court and coming to know the river as kin are different things, and Therapeutic Shamanism works on the second. See What is kinship, and why do animists extend it beyond humans?
