Wildeor Voices: A World Where “Our Better Angels” Grant Wild Things and Places Legal Standing Equal to Humans
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”
Kim Crumbo on a river trip with Wildlands Network. Photo: Tracey Butcher
This edition of Wildeor Voices is dedicated to a remarkable man, conservationist and very good friend, Kim Crumbo. Crumbo came into my life, and into Wildlands Network's family, at a critical time in the development of our Western Wildway program. His passion, knowledge and gravitas in the community set us on a better course, and his wisdom and commitment to the wild had a profound effect on all of our staff. Kim and his brother, Mark, left us when something went wrong on a canoe trip on Shoshone Lake in Yellowstone National Park on September 13, 2021. The incident remains a mystery, and Kim was never found. We miss him.
My friend Kim Crumbo was the toughest person I’ve ever met. He was also the most optimistic in the face of all we know about the perilous state of the Earth under human domination.
Crumbo, as he was commonly called by his friends, served two tours with Navy Seal Team One in the Vietnam war. He saw and lived through the darkest of moments. Upon his return he found refuge on the waters of the Colorado River and the wildlands of the Colorado Basin. Legend has it that Crumbo was the real-life inspiration for the character Hayduke in Edward Abbey’s book, “The Monkeywrench Gang.”
Kim was a student of history, an avid reader, a force of nature in the conservation world, and a lover of creatures with big teeth and claws, particularly wolves. Kim didn’t speak up often, but when he did, everyone listened. His wartime experience, plus over 20 years as a National Park ranger, gave him a gravitas, credibility and perspective on issues like carnivore protection and predator killing that few could match.
When I would express my frustration with the Sisyphean nature of trying to protect wolves in the West, Kim would gently remind me of Steven Pinker’s work, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.” Pinker’s work is a fact-laden march through history documenting how, despite what we see on the nightly news, violence has gradually declined throughout human history. Kim was the definition of an eternal optimist.
Crumbo left us far too soon, but I know he shared my dream of someday seeing the adoption of a legal paradigm first advocated in 1972 by Christopher Stone, a University of California law professor, in which he argued that inanimate objects such as trees, rocks and rivers should have legal standing and recognizable, protected rights. “Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’ — those who are holding rights at the time,” he wrote.
He saw parallels for his argument with the eventual expansion of Roman law granting rights to children and women and now corporations. And indeed, Pinker picks up on this expansion, noting how over the past 50 years laws have progressed from protecting animals from cruel practices, for instance in laboratory settings, to the wild, with state resolutions and laws outlawing practices such as bear hunting with dogs, and regulating trapping.
However, we have not reached the place dreamed of by Professor Stone. These laws are typically thought of as animal “welfare,” limiting what people can do to animals, based on the idea that it is morally wrong to act in a way that causes sentient beings to suffer.
I like to think of these measures another way: as laws recognizing the rights of these creatures to be free from cruelty. There is reason to hope for even broader recognition of the rights of animals and inanimate objects; that dream is still alive and actually coming true in other countries across the world.
There is a new movement on the rise, broadly called “Earth Law:” an emerging body of pronouncements and laws for protecting, restoring and stabilizing the functional interdependency of Earth’s life and life-support systems.
Latin America has been a world leader in this movement. Ecuador was the world’s first country to recognize the rights of Nature in a constitution. This reflects the beliefs of its population, especially its indigenous peoples.
A few months later, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court weighed in again, this time in a case involving a captive monkey named Estrellita. In the Estrellita case, the Constitutional Court held that the rights of nature doctrine extend to wild animals—that, in addition to any other available legal protections, wild animals enjoy special constitutional protections as “nature.”
In 2010, Bolivia passed the “Laws of the Rights of Mother Earth,” including rights to diversity, water, air and Earth’s equilibrium. In Colombia, two ecosystems, the Atrato River Basin and the Colombian Amazon, have been given the legal status of a person. Brazil’s constitution recognizes the importance of an ecologically balanced environment, although from an anthropocentric perspective.
In India, courts have issued rulings recognizing the legal rights of rivers and all members of the Animal Kingdom. In New Zealand, numerous laws recognize the intrinsic value of Nature and that animals are sentient beings. In 2016 and 2017, the government relinquished ownership of a national park, conferring on it “all the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person,” and pronounced a river “an indivisible and living whole.”
What about the United States, Canada and the European Union? Well, we have work to do. But there are some baby steps that have been taken and movement is afoot.
However, it is important to remember that even in those countries mentioned above, words on paper have little meaning absent enforcement. And as we’ve seen in the United States the promising proclamations of the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and indeed every law intended to protect even a measure of other species or objects from the unfettered, economically driven exploitation by humans, has been attacked, weakened, and overruled by political fiat or benign neglect from “friendly” administrations. What can be granted can be taken away.
Nevertheless, I will honor my good friend Hayduke, err Crumbo, and continue to dare to dream of a more just paradigm.
Kim Crumbo also knew how to persevere and the value of relentlessness. President Biden recently protected a part of the world that Crumbo worked for many years to protect with his designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. Congratulations, Kim.
