Some reasons to side with the whales

Recently Pacific indigenous leaders Kingi Tuheitia Potatau and the Kaumaiti Nui of Rarotonga launched the Hinemoana Halo Ocean Initiative, which includes a call for recognition of legal personhood for whales.

This is significant for a number of reasons, including the leadership co-operation, its broad oceanic focus, and application of indigenous knowledge to species protection.

All this is in the face of our Government sailing its own waka hourua in, shall we say politely, a different direction. As it conducts its “war on nature” it is vital that we have many joining together and taking nature’s side. The aspect on which I comment is the application of the idea of personhood for whales to wider issues. I support that call for recognition of whales’ legitimate interests as a natural extension of previous actions in Aotearoa.

This country lead the world in 2014 when legal person status was accorded to the Urewera area. This was followed by the same for Whanganui Awa and later Taranaki Maunga.

These are important from a Tiriti point of view as part of iwi settlements recognising taonga. But they have an even wider application. They are far from simply symbolic. But they should not be interpreted simply through a eurocentric legalistic view.

The notion of identity between people and nature may be foreign in some contexts but it forms an important part of many world views, te Ao Māori not least.

A Buddhist teacher used to warn me that I could never understand his perspective unless I rejected the idea of separation between people, and between people and nature. First you separate, then you denigrate, then you exploit. It does not happen in the other direction.

Even the rather narrow interpretation of legal personhood for whales or other aspects of the natural world has big implications. After all, it is hard to be selective between species or other aspects of nature for this purpose.

So these declarations become, as they rightly grow, declarations about nonseparability. The very idea of declaring legal personhood within this narrow view has a high degree of arrogance in it. See, such things have attained the status of being a person!

Another view would be that we attain the status of reintegration with nature. Now that would change perceptions.

But still, this idea of legal personhood is a step forward for recognition. From treating whales as a food and fuel source to that of a person is a decent step for whales and for us.

The narrow idea is not really new. After all, legal personhood is essential to the operation of many corporate entities and has a long history. There is no current danger of companies becoming an endangered species, but the ability for them to take many actions and defend their interests is essential to the way we currently conduct economic activity.

We live in a world where having such a legal status is accepted as that most valuable of things, a property right. In this world there has been a gradual dismantling of collective or common rights in favour of property rights.

Historically this dates back all the way to land enclosures and expropriations of indigenous lands. More recently we have seen the deconstruction of unions and collective bargaining.

We can see current weakening of community and collective rights to oppose developments or resource extraction, to school lunches. Increasingly it is property rights, typically individualised, which matter. And even these are threatened by a hierarchy of property rights which favour some over others.

In this context we see defunding and elimination of collective rights in health, social support, housing and health – as what were common rights become subject to various justifications and exclusions based on individual status.

An individual right is important, but enforcing that right very often requires collective action. There is a strong current political push to individualise everything under a distorted perception (deliberately distorted in my view) that we are all equal in resources and power.

Everyone knows that this is not true, but it has use to those with resources and power because it undermines collective ability to enforce common rights.

Those with lesser resources and power have looked to the state to protect common interests. Often it has done this, but equally often that same state protects property rights of individuals and corporates (aka legal people) against those common interests.

We are currently experiencing one of the periodic shifts in favour of the private group against the common. Large and small but consistent and every day, from weakening collective bargaining to, I read today, withdrawing previously regular funding from the Ministry of the Environment (notice that it is not “for” the environment) for an annual conference of the moderate and research-based Environmental Defence Society.

You see, common rights need the ability for people to act in common interests with and for all those holding the rights. To have strong common interest organisations, not just isolated individuals.

Rights are important. But the whales had still better be careful.