Nature has rights! What if we took this idea seriously?

Alberto Acosta, an Ecuadorian economist, helped shape that constitution as president of the Constituent Assembly. With the Argentine environmental lawyer Enrique Viale, his fellow judge on the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, he co-wrote a book now available in German as Die Rechte der Natur: Fundament einer anderen Gesellschaft (The rights of nature: Foundation of a different society). To mark its release, the two discuss Pachamama and Buen Vivir, extractivism, and the radical idea of treating nature not as a mere resource but as a subject with rights of its own.

Their book asks why it seems normal to us that corporations have rights and can enforce them in court, while the same idea sounds absurd when applied to the nature our lives depend on. They trace the roots of this thinking back to the colonization of the Americas and beyond, to a worldview that reduces nature to a storehouse of raw materials and a dumping ground for endless growth on a finite planet.

This is not a conventional book launch but an evening of politics and music about law, nature, power, and the possibility of a different future. The Grupo Sal Duo accompanies the conversation with music.

This event is organized by Lateinamerika-Forum Berlin e.V. in collaboration with Grupo Sal.