In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to declare in its constitution that nature is a legal person.57 Articles 10 and 71-74 of the Constitution recognize the inalienable rights of ecosystems,58 give individuals the authority to petition on the behalf of ecosystems,59 and require the government to remedy violations of nature’s rights,60 including “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.”61 The provisions were written by Ecuador’s Constitutional Assembly with input from the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, a Pennsylvania-based non-governmental organization providing legal assistance to governments and community groups. Its drafts seek to “change the status of ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities.”

Nature as a legal person
https://journals.openedition.org/vertigo/16188

Flowing through the heart of New Zealand’s North Island, the Whanganui River is one of the country’s most important natural resources. The river begins its 290km journey on the snowy north-western side of the Mount Tongariro active volcano, winding between green hills and mountains until it meets the Tasman Sea. Revered for centuries by the Whanganui tribes – who take their name, spirit and strength from the river they live near – it became the first river in the world to be recognised as a legal person in 2017, bringing closure to one of New Zealand’s longest-running court cases.

The Maori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand, had been fighting for more than 160 years to get legal protection for the river. The Whanganui tribes have nurtured a deep connection with the waterway for at least 880 years – more than 700 years before European settlers arrived. They have relied on it for much of their food, travelled it by canoe and built villages on its banks.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200319-the-new-zealand-river-that-became-a-legal-person

Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet's trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.

Duke University Press - Savage Ecology
https://www.dukeupress.edu/savage-ecology

Pluriversal Politics - The Real and the Possible

In Pluriversal Politics Arturo Escobar engages with the politics of the possible and how established notions of what is real and attainable preclude the emergence of radically alternative visions of the future. Reflecting on the experience, philosophy, and practice of indigenous and Afro-descendant activist-intellectuals and on current Latin American theoretical-political debates, Escobar chronicles the social movements mobilizing to defend their territories from large-scale extractive operations in the region. He shows how these movements engage in an ontological politics aimed at bringing about the pluriverse—a world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding. Such a politics, Escobar contends, is key to crafting myriad world-making stories telling of different possible futures that could bring about the profound social transformations that are needed to address planetary crises. Both a call to action and a theoretical provocation, Pluriversal Politics finds Escobar at his critically incisive best.

Duke University Press - Pluriversal Politics
https://www.dukeupress.edu/pluriversal-politics

The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human is in and through time. The idealized architectures of social formations that have hitherto been thought of as purely “social” structures are now beginning to betray their subtended geologies. Unraveling the fantasies of growth without accumulation, the global effects of climate change and resource depletion suggest that there is no accumulation without dispossession in both social or geological worlds. This new vision of the geologic underpinnings of social formations suggests that the “standing stock” of matter was never a suitable means to theorize how the geo and social hook up, or come to matter, nor does it adequately account for the full reach of those geosocial formations into time and sub-surface matter. Ruination of the future, it seems, is as a much a product of the subtended infrastructures of architectural projects as it is of these interventions themselves. Or, to put it another way, what was once imagined and imaged as extraneous and external to the rational projects of materializing late modernity might now seem to have found it had a missing substratum.

Accumulation - Kathryn Yusoff - Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/

TUHO:

What is a holobiont and why can it change our understanding of the world? | Science & Tech | EL PAÍS English
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-02-08/what-is-a-holobiont-and-why-can-it-change-our-understanding-of-the-world.html

Holobionty jako fascinující evoluční koncept. Když jedno tělo znamená celý svět - VOXPOT
https://www.voxpot.cz/holobionty-jako-fascinujici-evolucni-koncept-kdyz-jedno-telo-znamena-cely-svet/

Planet Management is a study of, and contribution to, the history of "globality" — the emergence of a complex organization of politics, economics, and culture at a planetary rather than a national level. Drawing on historical archival research as well as recent theoretical work in science studies and critical theory, the book tell the story of the central role of technoscientific discourses and practices in the emergence of globality.

https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Management-Simulation-Emergence-Topographies/dp/0810115883

Chakrabarty: The planet is a political orphan. Theoretically, people have been designing global governance, but they still do so, naturally, in terms of nations. Think of the Himalayas. There are eight or nine rivers issuing from the Himalayas that service about eight or nine countries, from Pakistan to Vietnam, so the glaciers are important to these countries. But the glaciers are all nationalized. India owns India’s glaciers, Pakistan owns Pakistan’s glaciers, etc. The result is that the Himalayas have become the most militarized mountain range in the world. India and China have fought wars there. If you look at the number of tanks, the number of military bridges built, the blasting of the mountain, you can see that nation-states remain totally invested in geopolitics.

How do we move from here to a planetary-level governance? Can we move on the basis of a planetary calendar? The IPCC’s report last year and the year before was described by the UN as “code red” for climate, and they used the expression “climate emergency.” Now clearly “emergency” connotes a sense of time because it signals urgency. It’s urgency on a planetary calendar; it’s asking for some kind of synchronization of national and subnational actions. It is saying to nations, “Can you come together on this by this time? Because that’s what the planet needs.” But nations remain mired in the temporality and politics of development.

Dipesh Chakrabarty On Planetary Politics
https://www.noemamag.com/the-planet-is-a-political-orphan/

TUHO: Infrastructuring as a Planetary Phenomenon: Timescale Separation and Causal Closure in More-Than-Human Systems Bronislaw Szerszynski

Abstract: »Infrastructuring als planetarisches Phänomen: Zeitskalentrennung und kausale Schließung in mehr-als-menschlichen Systemen«. Building on recent work identifying how the infrastructures of human social and economic life themselves depend on the “natural infrastructure” of biogeochemical systems, I explore the idea that infrastructuring – involving causal relations between subsystems operating at different timescales – might be a strategy widely adopted by matter undergoing self-organization under planetary conditions. I analyze the concept of infrastructure as it is used to describe features of the human “technosphere” and identify the importance of a difference in timescales between supporting and supported structures and processes. I explore some examples of how the wider planet might be said to engage in timescale-distancing and infrastructuring, focusing in particular on examples from the hydrosphere and biosphere. I then turn to the question of how to explain infrastructuring, developing a neocybernetic account of infrastructuring as involving the separation of a system into subsystems at different timescales in mutual but asymmetrical causal relations. I conclude by exploring the implications of this approach for the way we think about planets
in general and the human technosphere.

https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/83797/ssoar-hsr-2022-4-szerszynski-Infrastructuring_as_a_Planetary_Phenomenon.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-hsr-2022-4-szerszynski-Infrastructuring_as_a_Planetary_Phenomenon.pdf