The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things

Analyses the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American ‘rights of nature’ legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman political speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy.

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The Rights ofNature and The Testimony of Things: Literature and Environmental Ethics from Latin America begins by analyzing the ethical debates and political contexts relating to Latin American “rights of nature” legislation and the political ontology of nonhuman political speech within a framework of intercultural and multispecies diplomacy. Anderson shows how these political ontologies work in Latin American writing on animal ethics, since animal rights are often considered the bridge between human rights and the rights of nature.

In addition to legal frameworks, Anderson looks at Latin American literary contributions and how they can complicate our understanding of the philosophy of ethics he explores in terms of human and nonhuman relation and obligation. He expands this discussion into the cosmopolitics of human‑plant assemblages, which leads to a formulation of environmental ethics centered on the collective, multispecies work of maintaining environments and ecological cycles, as well as responding to the critical roles that disability and reciprocal care play within this ethics. Finally, the author analyzes the points of connection and divergences between Latin American relational ontologies and Euro‑American posthumanist theories within indigenous Latin American re‑modernization projects that reappropriate and repurpose ancestral practices as well as developing new technologies with the goal of forging an alternative modernity compatible with a livable future for all species.