The Rights of Nature and the Testimony of Things

"In a planet that is witnessing the extinction of thousands of species every year, the question of how to safeguard and interact with non-human subjectivities has never been so urgent. Drawing from literature, law, philosophy, and Latin American Indigenous thought, this tour-de-force of a book investigates how such interaction has been imagined, theorised, and put into practice."
—Lúcia Sá, author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture

"This is a brilliant and indispensable book. Mark Anderson reframes conversations about the politics and ethics of the non-human by thinking of interspecies diplomacy as a conceptual laboratory.  He opens new critical vocabularies at the intersection of Amazonian epistemologies, Latin American literary thought and posthuman theory. A must-read intervention for the critical debates to come."
—Gabriel Giorgi, author of Formas communes: Animalidad, cultura, biopolítica

"A thoroughly researched and well-written book on a pressing topic, Anderson's conceptualization of the rights of nature is of interest not only to Latin American scholars but also to researchers working on environmental rights in other geographical contexts."
—Patrícia Vieira, author of States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture

“Drawing on a collection of primary texts and the theorization of influential scholars and thinkers/activists from beyond the academy (e.g., the Yanomami, the Zapatistas, Indigenous social movements in Ecuador and Mexico), Anderson observes the increasingly untenable conceptual, political, and physical divide between human and other-than-human worlds that has come to light over the last century, largely as a consequence of the global climate crisis.”
—Tracy Devine Guzmán, author of Native and National in Brazil: Indigeneity after Independence