Vanuit de Ambassade van de Noordzee spreekt Anne van Leeuwen tijdens een programma op Border Sessions: Rights and or power for non-humans in human society
“As societal pressure on non-human populations has increased way beyond their carrying capacity, the search is on for ways of giving those populations a means of counterbalance within anthropogenic systems.
In this context different approaches are developed: in New Zealand (and the USA) some large collective non-human bodies have been granted a form of legal personhood to be able to better protect them from harm. In and around the Netherlands, the Embassy of the North Sea works with frameworks of political representation. In France, trees have been granted some rights.
A recent concept is the zoöp, a new kind of legal format for a coöperation in which both humans and collective bodies of non-humans are partners.
The zoöp does not start with granting rights, but is a procedure to give (a combination of biological and technological) non-humans a say in certain economic and ecological matters. How do these approaches complement each other?”
