Cormac Cullinan is a South African environmental lawyer whose book Wild Law (2002) was the first book to use and define the term Earth jurisprudence, for a philosophy of law that puts the whole Earth community, and not humans alone, at the centre. In his view human laws should be ‘wild laws’, in step with the living Earth, recognising that rivers, forests and other natural communities have rights of their own instead of treating them as property. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his picture of a land that belongs to all its beings, and adds that laws can only go so far, and that in the end the change has to come from within, through a renewed relationship with the other Peoples.
Who is Cormac Cullinan? #
An environmental lawyer, born in Pietermaritzburg and living in Cape Town, who directs a South African firm specialising in environmental law. As a student he was an anti-apartheid activist. He later worked as a lawyer in Durban, Luxembourg and London before returning to South Africa in 1999.1
He is one of the best-known figures in the rights of nature movement. He played a leading role in drafting the Universal Declaration of the Rights of 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, adopted at a peoples’ conference on climate change in Bolivia in 2010; the same year he helped found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature in Ecuador; and in 2015 he presided over a hearing of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal in Paris. In 2025 the Wild Law Institute, of which he is a director, began work to have the Table Mountain range recognised as a legal subject.1
What is Earth jurisprudence? #
A philosophy of law and government that is centred on the Earth, not on humans. The need for it was first identified by the cultural historian and priest Thomas Berry, who saw the human-centredness of existing law and politics as one of the great obstacles to living well on the planet. On this view humans are members of an Earth community, and the welfare of each member depends on the welfare of the Earth as a whole.2
Berry’s ideas were taken up at a meeting organised by the Gaia Foundation of London in April 2001, at the Airlie Conference Center near Washington DC, and Cullinan turned them into a legal programme.2 His Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice was published in South Africa in 2002 and in Britain in 2003, with a foreword by Berry, and was the first book to use and define the term.3
What is ‘wild law’? #
Human law that is in step with Earth jurisprudence. Cullinan’s starting point is that modern law is built the wrong way round. Humans, states and companies are legal persons, able to hold rights; almost everything else is property. Cullinan’s own summary is blunt: “Rivers and trees are objects, not subjects, in the eyes of the law and are by definition incapable of holding rights.” Corporations, meanwhile, are counted as people.4 So most of the community of life on Earth stays a stock of resources to be used, and damage to it is the normal working of the system, with protection the exception.
Wild law would turn this round. Natural communities and ecosystems would be recognised as legal persons with rights of their own, such as the right of a river to flow, and humans would take up their identity and their responsibilities as members of the Earth community, acting as good citizens of the Earth as a whole.4 The word ‘wild’ does not mean lawless. It names law that respects the Earth’s own ways of renewing itself, instead of law designed to tame and use it.
His ideas have reached the statute book in places. A small Pennsylvania borough, Tamaqua, passed an ordinance in 2006 drawing on them, one of the first ‘wild laws’ anywhere.5 In 2008 Ecuador wrote the rights of nature into its constitution, declaring that “Nature, or Pacha Mama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence”, and in 2017 New Zealand recognised the Whanganui River, Te Awa Tupua, as a legal person.6
Is Earth jurisprudence disputed? #
Yes, on practical grounds above all. Those comparing the new laws ask who grants such rights, on what legal basis they are recognised, and how they could be enforced in practice, and several scholars have argued that the movement’s claim to rest on Indigenous views is a myth, or that one-sided rights of nature could harm Indigenous communities.7 The movement’s own tribunals draw criticism too. The legal scholar David Boyd, who supports rights of nature, writes that critics argue, “with reason”, that the Rights of Nature Tribunal lacks legitimacy because no law set it up and it does not make sure that defendants are represented.8 And laws can be undone: a bill of rights for Lake Erie, voted in by the people of Toledo, Ohio, in 2019, was overturned by the state legislature five months later.8
Supporters reply that the legal machinery already exists. Justice Rajiv Sharma of the High Court of Uttarakhand in India, in a 2017 judgment on the Himalayan glaciers, rivers and the land around them, pointed out that a juristic person can be anything other than a human being to which the law gives personality for good reason, so that legal personality has always been a decision of the law and not a description of a thing. The Whanganui settlement answers the question of who speaks for a river by appointing guardians, Te Pou Tupua, to act and speak on its behalf.8 See What did Godofredo Stutzin argue about the rights of nature?
How does Earth jurisprudence connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the picture of who the land belongs to. For hunter-gatherers 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, human and more-than-human; more than that, the Peoples belonged to the land itself, and everything had its place and its right to exist.9 Cullinan’s Earth community, in which humans are members alongside rivers and forests and not owners of them, is a lawyer’s way of reaching towards the same thing.
His diagnosis also meets the account of 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. With the adoption of agriculture humans stopped seeing themselves as part of the land and decided that they owned it, and that they would decide who lived on it and who died. Taker cultureTaker culture. Daniel Quinn’s term for the totalitarian agricultural, owning, surplus-driven way of life that takes everything and leaves nothing, and calls itself ‘civilisation’. Cultural, not innate, which is why it can be changed. Used interchangeably with ‘Fallen culture’. Read the full answer is aggressive in its underlying mindset, which is one of ownership and of wiping out any perceived competition.10 When farming emerged, other beings became possessions, and as ‘property’ they had no rights.11 Wild law is an attempt to undo, in law, what that turn did. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures? and What is the myth of human supremacy?
And the movement belongs to the recovery from the Fall. Over the last few hundred years there have been signs of a slow return of empathy, from the abolition of slavery to animal welfare laws and, since the 1960s, a great many environmental protection laws, campaigns and charities.12 The rights of nature can be seen as a further step on that road. See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On how far law can reach. Legislation to protect minorities, the vulnerable and the environment is wonderful, and laws are necessary. But hunter-gatherer cultures did not look after the land because they had laws telling them to; they looked after it because the people in them simply would not do otherwise. A law can protect a group, but no law can make people feel empathy for it. Outer changes only last if they are planted in a soil of deep inner change.13
For the same reason, the relationship of hunter-gatherers with the other Peoples and the land was not an idea, a belief or a principle, “nor a law”. It was something heartfelt, arising from Soul and from Spirit, and shamanism, with its ability to talk with animals, plants and the land and even to become them, is one of the ways it is found again.14 Earth jurisprudence asks what the law should say about a river. Therapeutic Shamanism starts with meeting the river, and expects right relationship to grow from there. The two can work side by side. See What is right relationship, and what is reciprocity? and How does animism respond to eco-despair, and why is activism part of the path?
