In a first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s creative rights, the MOTH Collective submitted a petition to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognize the Los Cedros cloud-forest as the co-creator of a song.
October 29, 2024
FFungi Staff
FFungi Volunteer
In a groundbreaking move for legal and environmental history, the MOTH (More Than Human) Life Collective submitted a petition to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognize the Los Cedros cloud-forest as the co-creator of a song titled "Song of the Cedars,” composed in collaboration with musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci, and legal scholar CésarRodríguez-Garavito. This will be the first legal attempt to recognise an ecosystem’s moral authorship in the co-creation of a work of art.
The petition proposes to extend the already established legal personhood of the Los Cedros Biological Reserve, recognized by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court in 2021, when it ruled in favour of cancelling mining permits in the reserve. The"Song of the Cedars" case is poised to take this recognition a step further, extending it into the creative domains. This action creates a legal path whereby the natural world is acknowledged as a vital creative force. The rights that the petition pursues for Los Cedros and the human co-creators are moral rights – that is,recognition of co-authorship – as opposed to economic rights over royalties.The song will be both available for free download and released on streaming platforms; any income generated through the latter will go directly to the recently established Los Cedros Fund for the protection of the cloud forest.
The song has been released by MOTH Records, a label emerging from the MOTH Life Collective,which platforms music created in collaboration with the living world – a noisy, musical place with the power to change the way we think, feel and imagine.
This legal case aims to disrupt traditional anthropocentric copyright frameworks by granting creative rights to a non-human natural entity. This is the first known attempt in any jurisdiction to establish the 'moral authorship' of an ecosystem as a co-creator in a work. The forest’s essence is embedded in the song –– an immersive musical experience that includes natural sounds such as Toucan barbets, echolocating bats, Howler monkeys, crickets, rustling leaves and even a subterranean recording of the soil taken from the exact location where a new species of fungus was collected and described.These were recorded in the upper regions of Los Cedros in 2022, during an expedition organised by Robert Macfarlane as part of the fieldwork for his upcoming book about rivers and the rights of nature movement, Is A RiverAlive? (due to be published in May 2025).
“Soundscapes of a specific ecosystem are unique, and the sum of all the sounds and noises can be thought of as the ‘voice’ of that place. In a healthy ecosystem, species evolved in such a way that they each communicate and vocalise without drowning each other out,leaving space for each other both in time and frequency creating a rich polyphony. This was both a huge source of inspiration and a large part of the song: the living voice of Los Cedros Forest,” says musician Cosmo Sheldrake.
The submission of this petition marks a milestone in the evolving Rights of Nature movement, with the goal of extending moral rights to non-humans; in this case to an ecosystem. The right of “moral authorship” has thus far been recognized only in human creators. If the petition is denied, the MOTH Collective intends to bring this case to the Constitutional Court, in collaboration with Ecuadorian lawyers.
The song was officially released on October 29th, during the COP16 in Cali, Colombia, where musician Cosmo Sheldrake performed it at a joint 3F Initiative, MOTH and Fungi Foundation side event.
Listen to the song on your favorite streaming platform
