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In the summer of 2014, Markie Miller discovered she’d been drinking toxic coffee. Miller lives in Toledo, Ohio, where fertilizer runoff from farms had caused blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, her water supply. The city issued an alert at 2 am, but by the time Miller saw it she’d already been sipping her morning drink.
Miller started meeting with other residents to figure out how to protect their water. But what to do? You could sue a polluter (for polluting) or a government agency (for neglecting its regulatory duties), but even if you won, the damages would be too small to be an impediment. You could assemble a class action suit of hurt residents, but that’s a ponderous and uncertain process. The real problem, of course, was that the lake itself was polluted — and individuals can’t sue over that. In the eyes of the law, they don’t have “standing.” That’s when one activist raised an idea: What if the lake itself had standing? What if the citizens of Toledo passed a law giving it legal rights?
The idea of giving personhood to nature has been slowly gaining supporters. Environmentalists have encouraged governments and courts to award rights to lakes, hills, rivers, and even individual species of plants.
As intrigued as I am by the idea of mountains suing mining companies, though, I’m not sure the rights of nature will hold up in US courts. Corporations are against it. Even some indigenous thinkers aren’t keen on the idea, arguing that these new laws could infringe their treaty rights. And there’s some hubris here too. How do we humans know what nature wants or if it cares if humans survive?
Still, I think the approach is worth trying. The climate crisis is fully main stage, with California burning and Florida drowning. If we’re going to forestall worse to come, we need innovation not just in tech — more clean energy, resilient cities, genetically modified crops that need less fertilizer — but in law, the rule sets that architect our behavior.
The deep value of the personhood movement isn’t merely legal. It’s cultural. We’ve spent generations regarding the wilderness as a bottomless box of tissues, to be used and discarded at will. So we need a better way of talking about hills and forests and oceans; we need to see them with fresh eyes. Indigenous wisdom got this right, millennia ago. If we’re going to control our abuse of nature, we need to see it as our equal.
(Clive Thompson. www.wired.com, 17.12.2019. Adaptado.)
Considerando o contexto do artigo, a expressão “giving personhood”, no terceiro parágrafo, pode ser entendida como
