A more-than-human rights movement

These are not just thought experiments. At the MOTH Festival of Ideas-held at NYU Law School from March 12–14, 2025-legal scholars, Indigenous leaders, artists, and scientists gathered to explore a radical shift: moving from the “rights of nature” to a living, entangled understanding of justice. In an era of deep ecological and humanitarian crises, they asked: Can law listen not just to humans, but to the entire web of life?

Over three days, the festival hosted small morning dialogues of about twenty participants, followed by public keynote talks, poetry readings, and creative interventions in the afternoons. The conversations moved beyond courtroom battles and academic papers, touching on how art, Indigenous knowledge, and ecological science can reshape the very language of law.

At the heart of the discussions was a provocative premise: that rights, as we know them, are too limited to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene-and that expanding the legal imagination is not only possible, but necessary.

A New Era for Rights: Expanding the Legal Imagination

The MOTH project advocates for a broader recognition of life, emphasising reciprocity and the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human world. Originating from a background in human rights, César Rodríguez-Garavito is a legal scholar and practitioner and the founding director of the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) project. The ongoing initiatives include a partnership with Project CETI on the legal implications of AI-assisted translation of sperm whale communications and collaborations with the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks on legal actions to protect the fungal kingdom of life.

Rodríguez-Garavito explained that the More Than Human Rights Project - was born from its time - the Anthropocene - and shaped by its crises. 

At this moment, when the human rights project faces existential threats and profound crises, a radical reimagining of rights becomes urgent and necessary. Yet, Rodríguez-Garavito is clear: this reimagining is not a departure from the human rights project but a deepening of it. “The last thing we want to suggest,” he says, “is that we need to step back from that project and move on to the rights of nature.” 

Senior lecturer in environmental, climate change, multispecies and Indigenous politics Christina Winter, speaking of ‘sand’, asks if sand can be a subject of rights, and points out that justice must be rethought before any formulation of multispecies justice - against justice theories' obsession with the individual. Drawing from a Maori worldview - a relational way of knowing - Winter says, “We understand that everything is related, animals, including humans, vegetable, mineral, elemental, and spiritual, that no individual can flourish unless all the other components of the extended community are flourishing, and that it's our human obligation to support non-human flourishing.”

José María Gualinga Montalvo, from Sarayaku, spoke of the Kawsak Sacha (Living Forest) Declaration, first created in 1986 as a manifestation of the ancestral knowledge of the Sarayaku people through means of spiritual and legal language, calls on the Ecuadorian State to recognise the territory as a living being.  Approved in 2014 by the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku, launched globally in 2015 at COP21 in Paris, and declared in 2018 in Quito. “We have designed through symbols and ‘visions’, the source of connection with the world of being and the living forest.” According to Montalvo, Indigenous knowledge is too often referred to as romantic and legendary when it should be part of how we live. 

Entangled beings: Rethinking separation

Rodríguez-Garavito proposes a shift from "rights of nature" to "more-than-human rights." 

“There is no separation,” he says. “There is [only] entanglement.”

In this legal grammar of entanglement, human rights and the rights of the more-than-human world are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive. Rodríguez-Garavito argues that our legal traditions have often disconnected us from this web of life. “We humans declared ourselves the only citizens of the Earth,” he says. “We labelled all other beings as aliens without rights.” To correct this, the More Than Human Life programme calls for new laws and a new legal language capable of listening and responding to the agency of nonhuman beings.

This shift from rights to life reflects a broader recognition that rights alone are insufficient. While rights may be a generative grammar, they are incomplete. They were not built for the current ecological (and humanitarian) crises. As such, it is proposed that we think beyond rights - not to discard them, but to expand the legal imagination that supports them.

This means developing a grammar that is alive, relational, and reciprocal. Rodríguez-Garavito uses the Latin prefix re - to go back, respond, and recognise - as a guide. “To remember is to bring back together. To respond is to promise back. And to practice reciprocity, from reciprocal, is to rock back and forth - to move between two sides. It is a dance, a relational act that honours the vitality of all beings.”

Learning to listen

Within this expanded grammar, nonhuman entities are not passive objects but subjects with agency. 

Many Indigenous languages, Montalvo notes, are rich in verbs that express the doings of forests, oceans, and rivers. 

These are languages where the world is alive—where beaches, birds, and fungi are not things but doings.

“Rights,” Rodríguez-Garavito says, “are one way we try to respond—to say something back—as we listen to the sounds of the insects or the underground mycelium networks.”

Biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake, in conversation with Jonathan Watts,The Guardian’s environmental editor and founder of the environmental journalism platform Sumaúma, shared how fungi taught him to rethink power and perception. “As a child, I thought power came with size... But fungi and microbes taught me that power can lie in what’s hidden, slow, quiet.” Sheldrake’s recent book ‘Entangled Life’ is a powerful insight into the web of unseen forces shaping the world.

To listen to the planet is to tune into lives unlike our own, to rhythms that escape our grasp. When Sheldrake reflects on his scientific training, he points to the tension between understanding and projection. He explains that anthropomorphism is often avoided in the biological sciences at all costs. The reasoning is clear: if we constantly map human concepts onto other species, we risk only ever seeing ourselves, missing the world on its terms. But Sheldrake notes an irony: in avoiding anthropomorphism, science often reduces nature to a machine. “And what is a machine if not an artefact of human thinking?” He asks.

“It’s a cryptic anthropomorphism," he suggests, that pretends at objectivity while reflecting a narrow, industrial view of life. 

The Nature Rights movement has also been criticised for its anthropomorphism, yet, as is explained by the speakers throughout, this form of listening has existed and been eliminated, so this movement acts as an awakening of such forms of entanglement.

More-than-human rights in court

Educational sociologist and political ecologist Dylan McGarry (PhD), a multimedia artist and co-founder of the public storytelling foundation Empatheatre, was joined by One Ocean Hub director and special rapporteur on climate change Elisa Morgera to showcase ‘Indlela Yokuphila: The Soul's Journey’. The presentation aimed to render intangible ocean heritages more tangible in governance and education through animation and public dialogue. This film was used in three court proceedings in South Africa, successfully pursued by Indigenous fisher leaders and ocean defenders against the oil and gas giant Shell and the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy. These judicial decisions mark the first instance of an animation used as evidence in a South African court, serving as a proxy for the intangible cultural heritage of the ocean. As a production, the film addresses the significant oversight in ocean governance by examining the inclusion of spiritual and cultural heritages in decision-making and marine spatial planning. 

Building a more-than-human future

Jonathan Watts described his hope for MOTH as rooted in its radical inclusivity. “Anyone and everyone is welcome in the conversation,” he told FairPlanet. “From the lawyer to the artist - and even to journalists like myself!”

This cross-pollination of disciplines is what gives the movement strength. Some participants develop real-time legal strategies, while others imagine possible futures for more-than-human justice. The movement is inherently plural, operating across media, worldviews, and timescales.

Yet, it faces urgent questions: What is the language of the more-than-human? Who gets to speak on behalf of other beings? How do we ensure the movement does not replicate extractive logic under a different guise? Can it scale meaningfully in a world of widening social inequality and economic precarity?

The MOTH Festival didn’t offer easy answers, but it did provide new grammar, solidarity, and listening methods.

Image by Nasa.