Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I explore how indigenous ontologies can help pluralize legal ethics beyond ecological romanticism. I suggest that imagining a habitable planet may imply opening law to knowledges and practices based on respect and care, often not apprehensible through scientific knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

In a recent communication to the UN, the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) proposes to hold the Brazilian State accountable for violating the right to a healthy environment, arguing that the Brazilian Amazon and savannah are important for planetary ecological balance. In another document, a 2021 complaint of genocide and crime against humanity presented to the ICC, the destruction of the Amazon carried out by Bolsonaro’s government is treated as ecocide.

Both have a wide and diverse scientific base, produced within universities, think tanks, and civil society organizations. The indigenous peoples who inhabit these territories, however, have their own explanatory versions of why the forest should not be destroyed. For the Yanomami, the urihi a (land-forest) is a cosmological complex inhabited by an infinity of sparkling spirits (Kopenawa and Albert, 2010; Sztutman, 2004). The urihi a is, then, alive and the subject of an ethical relationship. However, the Yanomami are not the only indigenous people who extend their ethical notions to non-human entities, as shown by the writings of Deloria (1999) and other indigenous intellectuals.

In this presentation, I intend to explore how the Yanomami relationship with land can help pluralize legal ethics beyond ecological romanticism. Indigenous political ontologies (Blaser, 2013), when opposed to the abstract and generalizing thinking of law, show us that imagining a planet that is habitable in the future requires taking into account practices shaped by relationships of respect and care, often not apprehensible through scientific knowledge's objectifying logic (Viveiros de Castro, 2004).