Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Fungi offer a striking way to rethink the legal foundations of the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. While RoN seeks to recognize nature as a rights-bearing subject rather than an object of human use, its legal and philosophical frameworks often remain shaped by human-centered models of subjecthood, embedded in arboreal metaphors of trees and forests. This article argues that these arboreal metaphors reproduce stable identities and hierarchical relations, while fungi foreground interdependence, relationality, and distributed agency that unsettle conventional assumptions about legal subjects. Drawing on key RoN cases and debates in philosophy and legal theory, we show how thinking with fungi helps unbind the subject of law by challenging models of subjectivity that stabilize identities, reinforce hierarchy, and project human exceptionalism onto nature.
Source: Public humanities.
Institution: University of Freiburg
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7196968153