An unstable anomaly

Yet we needn't look far to notice nature's strange predilection for lifeless spots, or areas where life as we know it is impossible. We can see this in our own solar system, with planets that are freezing deserts or seething fireballs.

This is in contrast to our vision of nature as centered around ourselves, and earthly. We hear "nature" and we think of a bucolic landscape, with crystal-clear waters running through a green valley, filled with animals flying, grazing or frolicking amid foliage, cascades and streams — and all at a heavenly temperature of 22 degrees centigrade.

What we call nature is a near and fairly unstable anomaly, condemned to disappear in time, once the sun explodes, or with a tiny alteration of the earth's orbit. The slightest cosmic modification will suffice to turn this planet into a barren piece of ice or fire, or back into stardust.

A river as a legal person

Lately there has been considerable talk of Latin America's great contribution to philosophy through Andean neo-constitutionalism.

The contribution is more to jurisprudence than philosophy in fact. It is a legal concept wherein nature is declared a subject with rights, contradicting the West's "hegemonic modernity." Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia are the new adepts of this inclusion of nature in the legal order.

When a subject is given legal rights, it is also given duties.

Being the fussy but poor lawyers we've always been thanks to our colonial past, we think we can legislate everything away, forbidding volcanic eruptions, say, like the Spanish empire banned native tongues, nudity, human sacrifice, idol worship and promiscuity.

In ethical terms, generally, when a subject is given legal rights, it is also given duties.

In declaring nature a legal person, the first step is to stipulate that the "Pacha Mama (Mother Earth), where life and reproduction take place, shall have the right to comprehensive respect for its existence."

The Colombian Constitutional court recognized the Atrato river as an entity with rights. Very well, but it might have also reminded the river it had a duty — a legal duty — not to drown any child or adult, flood crop fields nor cast freshwater fish into the sea every time it overflows.

Good intentions are not enough

When nature is recognized as a subject with rights, I wonder if our laws will recognize the inalienable right of met to keep their natural, elliptical movement in space — even when they're heading for the earth.

There should also be a study on the right of tectonic plates to freely clash, and provoke tsunamis and earthquakes as they please. Indeed, let the Pacha Mama exercise her right to keep her ancestral gases and liquids deep inside her entrails, without humans poking to seek them out.

I know there are good intentions and considered ecological concerns behind the various declarations on the rights of nature. But their sentimentalism, I fear, can also spark contradictions and absurdities.

The universe is indifferent to life or death, to heat or cold, oxygen, hydrogen. For the natural world, everything is the same, whether there are animals, plants, water... or not.