Legal person status for the landscape might help us look after it
In 2014, the Uk-based environmental journal Dark
Mountain published an essay by anthropologist Carla Stang, eyecatchingly entitled “Rampant Rainbows and the Blackened Sun”. Its subject was the Mehinaku people of the Brazilian Amazon, and more specifically their colourful understanding of the universe, which to the Western mind seems, to put it mildly, utterly nonsensical. According to Stang, the Mehinaku believe that everything in existence, from animals and plants to cars and watches, has its archetype, or yeya, and that these yeyas still exist today, hidden away in the depths of the forest and at the bottom of lakes and rivers. As long as the yeyas are left undisturbed then they are able to go on producing replicas of themselves; however, if the landscapes they inhabit are damaged by man, the yeyas are either annihilated or caused to flee. Either way it’s bad news, as Stang explains:
“In Mehinaku terms... the yeya archetypes still exist shimmering and alive in the landscape. As the farmers and loggers cut away the edge of the forest the yeya that live in those particular parts of the forest are destroyed or retreat in anger. Likewise the poisoning of the water... threatens the yeya of the rivers, streams and lakes. Arako, a Mehinaku man, explained to me that this is in fact why the number of fish is decreasing: that is, white people’s poison has killed too many ‘Truefish’ and those that are left angrily cease to make their replica fish.”
Stang doesn’t claim that the Mehinaku world view is scientifically accurate, but she does argue that it might be valid on a deeper, more conceptual level. She concludes her essay by saying: “let us find ways to take other people like the Mehinaku seriously.” By trying to take their beliefs at face value, she suggests – by thinking like the Mehinaku – we could benefit from “precious thousands-of-years-old knowledge for how to live with ongoing
environmental devastation.”
Three years later, Stang’s essay provides an interesting lens through which to consider the plan, first reported last weekend in Scotland on
Sunday, to turn Ben Nevis into a “legal person” in order to better protect its interests. According to Scottish lawyer Colin Robertson, an expert with the UN Harmony with Nature programme, if the bid is successful the mountain would be granted the right to defend its ecological health, and guardians would be appointed to represent its interests, in the same way that minors and those with mental health issues can have other people act on their behalf.
If Ben Nevis does one day achieve legal personhood, it won’t be an event without precedent. In March this year, a Maori tribe called the Whanganui iwi won a 140-year long battle to have the Whanganui River on New Zealand’s North Island granted the same legal rights as a human being, on the grounds that they consider the river to be their ancestor. And not long after the Whanganui ruling, a court in the Northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered that the Ganges – considered sacred by more than a billion people – and its main tributary, the Yamuna, should also be accorded the status of living human entities.
In both of those landmark cases, however, the move to grant personhood to a feature of the landscape was – at least in part – a recognition of the religious or spiritual beliefs of a certain group. If there is a tribe somewhere on the outskirts of Fort William who worship Scotland’s tallest peak as a deity or consider themselves to be directly descended from it, they have yet to make themselves known to anthropology, so should Ben Nevis one day win his/her legal personhood, it could be the first time a nation has conferred such status on a landscape feature purely as a means of making it easier to protect.
Is the Ben Nevis case an example of Westerners “thinking like the Mehinaku” then, as Stang suggests we should? Perhaps the best answer to that question is “yes and no”. On the one hand, a court case in which a mountain was treated as a person would probably make some sort of sense to the Mehinaku – after all, they see their landscape as “shimmering and alive” with spirits that can become angry if disturbed, so a mountain afforded some of the same rights as a human might not strike them as particularly strange. However, the Mehinaku might also be puzzled by the Scottish obsession with one small corner of their country. As far as they are concerned, the yeya are present in all their known lands, so why, they might wonder, do the Scots seem to insist that all their yeya live in the same place?
In ecological terms, the Mehinaku, with their belief that yeya are spread throughout the natural world, would be a lot closer to the truth than a Scotland that afforded legal personhood to just one place. So perhaps if the Mehinaku have something useful to teach us here it’s this: consider that there might be yeya hiding everywhere in nature, not just on the tops of the highest mountains, and then legislate accordingly.
A court ordered that the Ganges and its tributary be accorded the status of living human entities