Conservation by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030139056
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Today, just as Biblical accounts are now more fully recognised as metaphorical devices, Māori are more likely to present such stories as a way of thinking about the generative powers, the spiritual essence (mauri) of the non-human world, encapsulated in more abstract terms such as ‘living ancestor’ or ‘living entity’.

On both sides of the Tasman Sea, then, the landscape is the spiritual and material substance of human persons: just as the well-being of Māori people and their homelands is seen as mutually interdependent, Aboriginal elders in Cape York describe how people are ‘grown up by’ and composed of their country (Strang 1997). The well-being of both is so closely intertwined that negative impacts upon one are believed to have a detrimental effect upon the other. This intimate sense of interconnectedness, and the capacity to co-identify with non-human beings, is a powerful projection of personhood, and thus a substantial basis for describing a river as a legal person.

As indigenous communities have achieved an influential voice in conversations across global networks, ideas about more equal and collaborative relations with non-human worlds are coming to the fore, and now form the basis of much ethical debate. Some degree of co-identification with the non-human is implicit in some of the ideas outlined earlier: for example in the notion of the biosphere (Vernadsky 1986), in Lovelock’s Gaia theory (1987[1979]), or in the ‘connected by water’ vision of the Hypersea (McMenamin and McMenamin 1994). However, these are quite large and abstract concepts with rather less affective force than is provided by the ‘ancestral’ co-relations that form the basis of identity for many indigenous communities. In industrialised societies, then, the challenge is how to give real immediacy to ideas that reposition humankind more collaboratively amongst all living kinds.

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