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Abstract
This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin’s Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity’s place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory of law’s capacity to initiate and institutionalize this new understanding. In place of a static theory of history and legal revolution, I propose a dynamic view of how narrative projects like the rights of nature contribute to cultural and political change. This comparative reading shows the utility of speculation in law and literature.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling (New York: Harcourt, 2000), 119.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 119–120.
4 “Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth,” World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 22, 2010).
5 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
6 Republic of Ecuador, Constitution of 2008. Available at Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service Center for Latin American Studies Political Database of the Americas, http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html.
7 Studies of how Ecuadorian courts have applied the rights of nature vary in their diagnoses. Some commentators see the courts’ failure to stop government initiatives to develop rainforest oil reserves as a sign of the rights’ impotence (Kotzé and Villavicencio Calzadailla, “Somewhere Between Rhetoric and Reality: Environmental Constitutionalism and the rights of Nature in Ecuador,” Transnational Environmental Law 6, no. 3 (2017)); others typify the new nature rights jurisprudence as an extension of the previous environmental law regime, with judges concerned with procedural regularity and the balancing of various entitlements (Craig M. Kauffmann and Pamela L. Martin, “Testing Ecuador’s Rights of Nature: Why Some Lawsuits Succeed and Others Fail.” Paper Presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, Atlanta, GA (Mar. 18, 2016)). Still others point to increasing judicial references to Articles 71 and 72 as an indication that judges are growing increasingly comfortable with the application of nature rights (Hugo Echevarría, “Rights of Nature: The Ecuadorian Case,” Revista Esmat 13 (2017)). The most significant Ecuadorian nature rights decision to date was handed down by the country’s constitutional court in November 2021: a government-backed initiative to open up the Los Cedros rainforest preserve to foreign mining concessions was overturned as a violation of the rights of nature (Corte Constitucional del Ecuador, Sentencia No. 1149-19-JP/21 (Nov. 11, 2021)).
8 Julio Marcel Prieto Méndez, Derechos de la naturaleza: Fundamento, contenido y exigibilidad jurisdiccional (Quito, Ecuador: Corte Constitucional del Ecuador, 2013), 29.
9 Ibid., 28.
10 Ibid., 30.
11 Republic of Ecuador, Constitution of 2008, Preamble.
12 Constitutional Court of Colombia, Decision T-622/16, (2016), https://www.corteconstitucional.gov.co/relatoria/2016/t-622-16.htm., § 5.9.
13 Rights of Nature Timeline. Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, 2022. https://www.garn.org/rights-of-nature-timeline/.
14 Christopher Stone, “Should Trees Having Standing?: Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” Southern California Law Review 45 (1972), 450.
15 Ibid., 450–51.
16 Ibid., 458.
17 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 202.
18 Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 4.
19 Ibid., 12.
20 Jodi Adamson. “Source of Life: Avatar, Amazonia, and an Ecology of Selves,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 264.
21 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change,” New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012), 13–14.
22 “Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth.”
23 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace Books, 2010), 35.
24 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009), 213–14.
25 Daniel Davison-Vecchione and Sean Seeger, “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction,” Theory, Culture & Society (2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211051780.
26 Angus Fletcher. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2.
27 Ibid., 5.
28 Ibid., 15–17.
29 Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World for Forest (New York: Tor Books, 1972), 9.
30 Ibid., 12.
31 Ibid., 16.
32 Ibid., 81.
33 Ibid., 44.
34 Ibid., 117.
35 Ibid., 188–89.
36 Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: The Word for World is Forest and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,’” in Ursula K. Le Guin: Modern Critical View, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 48–49.
37 Le Guin, Word, 64.
38 Ibid.
39 Watson, 52.
40 Julia D. Gibson and Kyle Powys Whyte, “Science Fiction Futures and (Re)visions of the Anthropocene,” in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology, ed. Shannon Vallor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 11.
41 Le Guin, Word, 112.
42 Davison-Vecchione and Seeger, 16–17.
43 Elizabeth Deloughrey. Allegories of the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.
44 Ibid., 2.
45 Ibid., 10.
46 Constitutional Court of Colombia, § 5.9.
47 Davison-Vecchione and Seeger, 16.
48 Le Guin, Word, 79.
49 Le Guin, The Dispossessed (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 70.
50 Ibid., 225.
51 Ibid., 280.
52 Ibid., 344.
53 Ibid., 345.
54 Ibid., 347–48, 358.
55 Ibid., 359.
56 Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 35.
57 Ursula K. Le Guin, Forgiveness Day, in Four Ways to Forgiveness (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), 71.
58 Ibid., 106.
59 Tom Moylan, Demanding the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986), 106, 114.
60 Ibid., 103, 106.
61 Nadia Khouri, “The Dialectics of Power: Utopia in the Science Fiction of Le Guin, Jeury, and Piercy,” Science Fiction Studies 7, no. 1 (1980), 53.
62 Ibid.
63 Erin Fitz-Henry. “The Natural Contract: From Lévi-Strauss to the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court,” Oceania 82, no. 3 (2012), 271–72.
64 Peter Burdon, “Obligations in the Anthropocene,” Law and Critique 31 (2020), 316.
65 Valladares and Boelens, 1020–1023.
66 Miriam Tola. “Between Pachamama and Mother Earth: Gender, Political Ontology, and the Rights of Nature in Contemporary Bolivia,” Feminist Review 118 (2018), 33.
67 Burdon, 315.
68 Ramiro Ávila Santamaria, El derecho de la naturaleza: fundamentos (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2010), 21.
69 Laurel Fish, “Homogenizing Community, Homogenizing Nature: An Analysis of Conflicting Rights in the Rights of Nature Debate,” Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal 12 (2013), 9.
70 Robert M. Cover, “The Supreme Court 1982 Term: Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983), 5.
71 Ibid., 9.
72 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 145.
73 Constitutional Court of Colombia, § 5.9.
74 Robert Nichols. Theft is Property!: Dispossession and Critical Theory (Duke University Press, 2020), 146.
75 Ibid., 150.
76 Ibid., 151.
77 Ibid., 157.
78 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 222.
79 Chakrabarty, “Postcolonial Studies,” 13–14.
80 Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 349.
81 Ibid.
82 Bolivia (Plurinational State of)’s Constitution of 2009, Preamble, https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bolivia_2009.pdf.
83 Prieto Méndez, 30.
84 Le Guin, The Dispossessed, 96, 165.
85 Deloughrey, 2.
86 “Legal and Literary Fictions,” in New Directions in Law and Literature, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 314, 316.
87 Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo, building on Adorno, proposes a “negative universal history” “whose mapping of the past opens up spaces for breaking with the racist and Eurocentric conceits found in the production of the historical narratives that have at once nourished and curtailed our political theorizations.” “Universal History Disavowed: Critical Theory and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 1, no. 4 (2008), 468.
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Notes on contributors
Ted Hamilton
Ted Hamilton is a Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Environmental Studies at Bucknell University. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School and is also an attorney and co-founder of Climate Defense Project. He is the author of Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future (OR Books, 2022).