Can a Cloud Forest Hold Copyright?

We are living through times of deep ecological and social crisis, facing one environmental catastrophe after another—from unprecedented biodiversity loss to climate change and growing uncertainty about our collective future. More than ever, our relationship with nature must change.

The More Than Human Rights (MOTH) project, co-organized by New York University School of Law, brings together changemakers across disciplines to expand legal frameworks beyond human-centered perspectives, recognizing the rights and sentience of the more-than-human world.

The phrase “more-than-human”, first coined by ecophilosopher David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, emerged as a way to better articulate our relationship with other life forms. Abram critiques terms like “environment,” which unwittingly reduces other species to a passive backdrop, and “nature,” often positioned in opposition to culture, reinforcing human separation from the living world.

Recently, MOTH members filed a groundbreaking petition with Ecuador’s copyright office to recognize Los Cedros cloud forest as a co-creator of a song, alongside musician Cosmo Sheldrake, writer Robert Macfarlane, field mycologist Giuliana Furci, and legal scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito.

This legal case centers on Song of the Cedars, a piece of music that emerged in 2022 when the group camped beneath the stars in Los Cedros during an expedition organized by author Robert Macfarlane as part of the fieldwork for Is a River Alive?, his forthcoming book on rivers and the Rights of Nature movement.

Song of the Cedars braids together the more-than-human melodies of the forest, featuring sounds from echo-locating bats, howler monkeys, chirping crickets, rustling leaves, and even a subterranean recording of the soil from the site where a newly identified fungus was discovered.

Recalling the moment of co-creation, Macfarlane describes how the lyrics took shape, “[...] my mind began spontaneously to bud the words to a song about that place at that time: ‘Trees speak in your leaves, please...and streams tell me your dreams…’”

“I noodled them out in a little notebook quickly, without struggle, as if they were being written with me, or even for me; ‘Birds sing me your rhymes please and stones teach me your times’, until soon there was the shape of a verse and a chorus, and I took those to Cosmo, and he began almost immediately to hear the melody and tone of the tune...” Macfarlane says. “On the process tumbled and turned, fast and strange and smooth, with the forest in its multifold being wholly present and participatory in all that we made with it.” 

The notion of granting personhood to more-than-human sentiences, such as animals, plants, rivers, or entire ecosystems, is not new. Many Indigenous cultures worldwide have long recognized, both philosophically and in practice, the rights of other beings to health and the deep interconnection between their well-being and that of our own species. Now, legal systems are beginning to reflect this understanding, as seen in the 2021 ruling that granted legal personhood to Los Cedros Biological Reserve, revoking mining permissions that would inevitably be detrimental to the entire ecosystem.

Building on the 2021 ruling, Song of the Cedars extends the rights of nature into creative domains. It is the first known legal attempt to recognize an ecosystem as the moral author of a work of art (the entity recognized as holding the personal, non-economic rights), bridging the conventional scope of copyright law through integrating the rights of nature into the domain of intellectual property.

“The key challenge is determining the practical implications of declaring a forest, river, species, or other non-human entities as rights-bearing subjects,” explains César Rodríguez-Garavito, the chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law and founding director of MOTH. “This is precisely why our initiative seeks to clarify and specify the effects of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court’s decision.”

Fungi, too, play a crucial role in reshaping how we think about life’s interconnectedness, and, by extension, its legal recognition. Giuliana Furci, founder of the NGO Fungi Foundation, emphasizes the deep entanglement of fungi with ecosystems and the urgent need to include them in legal frameworks.

“Fungi can play a pivotal role in the Rights of Nature movement due to, among others, the inseparability of their existence and that of living trees of a certain species,” shares Furci. “This means that giving rights to a fungus implies ensuring the life of its symbiotic tree.”

This recognition is already beginning to emerge in creative works, such as Song of the Cedars, which incorporates fungi into its vision of the living world.

“Naturally, Song of the Cedars mentions mould, a type of fungus, alongside other non-human beings because the song is created together with the fungi, animals, plants, and other organisms that are the forest,” says Furci.

For musician and composer Cosmo Sheldrake, the simple act of listening is an important first step in challenging anthropocentric notions of authorship and creativity. 

“For me, listening is one of the most important practices,” he shares. “The living world is a polyphonic place: everywhere and at all times, there are many voices communicating and making sound.”

He suggests that re-engaging with these voices can reshape not only how we hear but also how we understand intelligence, creativity, and even legal personhood, pointing to how Roger Payne’s recordings of humpback whale song in the 1960’s helped reveal the “rich cultural and musical complexities of their language and song,” playing a significant role in Greenpeace’s Save the Whales campaign.

“Life is increasingly understood to be a story of relationship, and relationships entail communication, whether sonic, chemical, visual, or otherwise. The more we study the different ways that organisms manage their togetherness, from our own microbiome or the fungal communities that enable plant life, the more our conventional notions of individuality and selfhood are challenged. These shifts in the fundamental understanding of what life is are bound to ask questions of our legal frameworks and categories such as intellectual property, rights, and ownership.”

The fight to recognize a forest’s authorship is more than a legal experiment, but rather a challenge to the very foundations of how we define creativity, collaboration, and our relationship with the living, breathing world.

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