Rights of Nature :: Rites of Spring

This morning I discovered an encouraging resource at Wikipedia on the Rights of Nature. I was poking around following up on yesterday’s posting. There’s been more activity, for longer, than I realized. I’m going to do more reading to catch up.

Meanwhile, while discussing the Wiki contents with the Better Half, she raised a question that bears watching and thinking about. The early emergence of insect pests this year reinforces her point. When we refer to rights of nature, where and how do we draw the bounds of the system(s) we’re referring to? Do we intend to grant the right of existence to mosquitoes and ticks, recognizing that they become food stock for other creatures? What about viruses such as COVID-19 and its variants? I’ve not read enough to have a clue how one would include or exclude rights for such beings.

does the moon have rights?

Photo by J. Harrington

To further complicate ponderings on this theme, I note that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, states, in part, as the first right “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Did this phrasing intentionally preclude those not yet born from human rights? How does that reconcile with the recent judicial decisions on the unborn? Can it be reconciled?

I’m vacillating between thinking we have a Gordian knot and a large can of worms here. I’m not even sure we have sufficiently clear terms and meanings to be sure where and about what we could agree to disagree. I’ll continue to plod about this thicket and report back from time to time. In the interim, I’ve no idea how we stay out of trouble. It used to be one had only to avoid discussing religion and politics.

Human Knowledge

By Robert Wrigley

About the only thing I thought I knew

was that nothing I’d ever know would do

any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part

of the horse’s hoof that most resembles

a human palm is called the frog;

certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use;

the abstruse circuitry of an envelope

quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.

 

Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made,

I took heart in the pointlessness of stars

and lay there until my teeth chattered.

I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge

building a birdhouse out of license plates

manufactured by felons in the big house.

No more paramilitary organizations for me,

I said, ten years before I was drafted.

 

I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick

fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook

a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend,

his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took

my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid

through the church service among the pipes

of the organ and still did not have faith,

although my ears rang until Monday.

 

I began to know that little worth knowing

was knowable and faith was delusion.

I began to believe I believed in believing

nothing I was supposed to believe in,

except the stars, which, like me,

were not significant, except for their light,

meaning I loved them for their pointlessness.

I believed I owned them somehow.

 

A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare.

The horse I loved foundered and had to be

put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope

quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right.

In cold air a nipple horripilates

and rises, the sun comes up and up and up,

a star that bakes the eggs

in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.

 

God was in music and music was God.

A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag

chain and threatened to beat me

to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign

I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags,

the one he said they’d leave in my mouth

before they zipped the body bag closed.

Yet one more thing I’d come to know.

 

He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass,

no more true than my ownership

of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord

in five or six places on the neck of a guitar.

A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s

becomes a callus, smooth as leather.

Stars are invisible in rainy weather,

something any fool knows, of course.

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