## Metadata - Author: [[Cormac Cullinan]] - Full Title: Wild Law - Category: #books ## Highlights - Entranced by our own creation and fascinated by the cleverness of our abstractions, we seldom notice the unpredictable, mysterious beauty of the ‘natural world’ beyond the glass. Even when we set out like astronauts to examine it, the bubble-visors of our technology-oriented culture distort our vision. We have become, as Thomas Berry puts it, ‘autistic’ in relation to Earth. ([Location 881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EGWJYNM&location=881)) - Governance systems based on Earth jurisprudence must include not only a conceptual framework that recognises that nonhuman members of the Earth Community can hold ‘rights’, but must also devise a language to describe those rights, and legal mechanisms for giving full recognition to them. In doing this we must approach the task with the proper degree of humility and perspective. The issue is not, as is so often conceived, deciding whether or not we humans should deign to grant rights to other species or to the environment. (They already have them, but they are invisible to our legal system because it cannot conceive of them.) The challenge is rather to re-conceptualise and develop the philosophical basis on which we organise and regulate our species so that it accords more closely with the reality of an interconnected universe of subjects. ([Location 1982](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EGWJYNM&location=1982)) - The idea of a universe of right-holding subjects may well sound very radical to someone steeped in the legal traditions of the homosphere. However, it is only our autism in relation to nature and our cultural amnesia vis-à-vis tens of thousands of years of our tribal histories that make this seem so outlandish. From the perspective of an indigenous tribal person, the idea that people might invent a fictitious being such as a corporation, ascribe enormous powers to it, and then dedicate much of their lives to enabling it to devastate their natural habitat, may seem far more perverse. ([Location 2005](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EGWJYNM&location=2005)) - Genetically engineered seeds have been manipulated by humans not to fit in with and contribute to a specific environment, but rather to co-exist with a patented herbicide, also developed to increase profit. These are products not of long-term intimate relationships, the timeless communion between members of an Earth Community, but of hurried, forced unions in the glassy sterility of a corporate lab. In this world the accumulated wisdom of evolutionary experience and the integrity of life forms count for nothing, and the share options of the CEO for everything. ([Location 2036](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EGWJYNM&location=2036)) - Earth jurisprudence must take account of the central importance of balance in the natural world. Not the stasis of equal weights in each pan of the scales of justice, but the ever-changing flux, the ‘creative disequilibrium’ of the universe: always moving, always changing, but never moving in one direction for long without swirling back to seek equilibrium or re-establish the pattern again. As the symbol of Yin and Yang graphically demonstrates, as Yin waxes, so Yang must wane, until the reverse occurs, but all the while the cycles of response and counter-response maintain the whole. ([Location 2131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EGWJYNM&location=2131))