On a recent walk through the wetlands preserve near my home I found myself contemplating the rights of the natural environment.
This is an area that I’ve been walking for more than a decade, wading when the rainy season puts the trails underwater. I’ve come to know it well and in my early experiences with it, I have found myself quickly laid out when my respect for the area had waned. Several twisted, sprained and even broken ankles later, including one instance where I had to crawl on hands and knees down the trail, I’m much more aware of my presence and reverent of the spirits who dwell there.
Like much of Florida, the preserve has changed dramatically in a short time. Developers regularly try to grab land from it to squeeze more transplants in from other states. During the Covid-19 pandemic the state had become the fastest-growing state in the nation for the first time since 1957, another time which had been marked by rapid growth, spurred on by land grabs and more widely available air conditioning.
During the peak of Covid, the growth was from the state’s lax or non-existent rules about managing the spread of the disease and people moving from cities where real estate was comparatively much more expensive. People fled from New York and New Jersey, as they always have, but new license plates started popping up in droves, showing a large number of Californians, Texans and people from Illinois all looking to escape lockdowns and mandatory masking. So many people moved in that the state picked up an extra seat in the House of Representatives. And thanks to a Republican lockdown in the state government, Florida’s governor and his ilk were more than happy to redraw districts to ensure that seat would go to their party.
Another effect of all the new people settling in was that an already hot housing market exploded, shifting the American dream of home ownership even further out of reach of most working people. Florida, always a developer’s playground, responded as Florida always does — by trying to extract as much money as possible from the situation.
Nathan Hall
Mushrooms growing on Florida wood [N. Hall]
For the natural environment, what this influx meant can be summed up with a tidy little term called “infilling”. Infill is nothing new in urban planning, and in many cases, it’s a logical and helpful way to increase housing by utilizing neglected or abandoned property that sits between existing buildings. What infilling in Palm Beach County and across much of South Florida has meant is massive tracts of undeveloped land being put under the bulldozer in order to create multi-family units filled with condos that start in the $400,000 range and go up from there. Our last remaining patch of old-growth forest had already been a victim of a previous construction boom and now the rest of the “unused” land is getting swept up.
Most, especially in this area, would call that progress. The local economy runs on construction and tourism, and our governor — who on his best days shows all the brilliance of a sack of gravel — has made sure that tourism takes a hit with his supremely stupid bid to “win” the culture wars.
As part of my spirituality, I am an animist. The rights of nature and of natural entities to my mind are at least as sacrosanct as the rights of people. Consider the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United vs. FEC, decided in 2010, which effectively granted personhood status to corporations. If a corporation has the same constitutional rights as an individual, why couldn’t an ecosystem?
In fact, there have been movements around the world and yes, even in the U.S., that have attempted, and in some cases succeeded, in granting personhood status to natural fixtures. Consider the case of the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Several Māori tribes who have an ancestral connection with the river petitioned and got a landmark law passed that, according to the Associated Press, “declares that the river is a living whole, from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements.” For the Māori Iwi, a confederation of tribes, the Whanganui is where their ancestors reside and is where they commune with their beloved dead. Gaining personhood status means that if any mining, construction, or development interests want to get involved in the area, they have to petition local tribes who are now seen as the caretakers and representatives of the river.
Nathan Hall
[N. Hall]
In 2014, the Supreme Court of India extended right to life protections in their constitution to non-human animals, and in 2021 Canada recognized the legal rights of the Mutesheku Shipu (Magpie River). These are just some of the examples of how movements have risen to fight the extraction of late stage capitalism.
But it’s not happening without a fight. Back in my home state, legislators saw the shifting tide, and in an innocuously named “Clean Waterways Act” bill, legislators snuck in some language that effectively banned consideration of the legal rights of nature. The bill stated that local governments were prohibited “from providing legal rights to any plant, animal, body of water, or other part of the natural environment unless otherwise specifically authorized by state law or the State Constitution.”
The bill passed unanimously in both the State House and State Senate and quickly became law. And since the National Democratic Party has effectively abandoned the state, the chances of seeing favorable movement to counter any of these moves legislatively are nil in the short to medium term.
Still, the electorate has shown an appetite for passing laws that protect nature. In 2014 a citizen-initiated amendment to the constitution enshrining conservation efforts for 20 years and earmarking nearly $20 billion for it was passed — the largest conservation law ever created in the country at that time. Naturally, the legislature has dragged its heels on executing the plan and for their effort, have made it nearly impossible for new citizen-initiated ballot measures to be included.
As humans, we have to stand against the cynical and prove to the rest of the world that we are capable of partnering with it, of asking permission rather than taking what we could never own in the first place. As magickal practitioners, we can aid our other-than-human friends by crafting political and beneficial workings. While it’s easy to get down about our situation, believe me friends, I know, I’m in Florida, we need to keep working because it’s not just about us as humans, it’s about all of us on this planet.
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