Listening to the Nonhuman World: On Strategies for Saving the Biosphere

Gaia’s Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth by Karen Bakker. The MIT Press, 2024. 288 pages. The Politics of Rights of Nature: Strategies for Building a More Sustainable Future by Craig M. Kauffman and Pamela L. Martin. The MIT Press, 2021. 290 pages.

IN ONE OF THOSE quirks of memory, I distinctly remember my high school calculus teacher describing his home state of Pennsylvania as “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between.” Tamaqua Borough, a coal-country community of 7,000 people, is firmly in Pennsylvania’s Alabama belt. Its population is poor and white, and has declined in every census since 1930. Over two-thirds of voters in its county cast ballots for Donald Trump in the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections.

Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in other words, isn’t what comes to mind when you picture the home of pioneering ecological radicalism. But that’s what it is. In 2006, the town adopted a law —the Tamaqua Borough Sewage Sludge Ordinance—that set off a legal revolution. To prevent construction of a planned sewage sludge deposit facility, in a community already surrounded by three EPA Superfund sites, the Borough Council redefined legal personhood to include nature: “Borough residents, natural communities, and ecosystems shall be considered to be ‘persons’ for purposes of the enforcement of the civil rights of those residents, natural communities, and ecosystems.” In recognizing natural objects as legal “persons” with rights, the council intended to counteract existing corporate property rights to pollute and “to interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems.” It was the world’s first rights-of-nature statute.

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