Living Earth Species Doctrine
Year: 2026
Type: report
Abstract: The Living Earth Species Doctrine (LESD) is a public-interest model law, governance, standards, and continuity corpus that treats Homo sapiens as one animal species within a living Earth system and develops that premise into a finite but living architecture for law, institutions, technology, ecology, animals, future generations, artificial systems, and long-horizon civilization. Version 1.0 brings together 119 finite instruments spanning scientific and ethical foundations, constitutional and statutory clauses, Rights of Nature, planetary boundaries, One Health / One Biology, soil, freshwater, oceans and cryosphere, sentient animals, children and future persons, corporate and fiduciary duties, existential risk, peace and conflict, continuity preservation, artificial systems, memory and identity, communication, reset and reinitialization, power modes and switching, universal action-state grammar, time and escalation, data lifecycle operations, shared responsibility, human-first governance, spiritual freedom and epistemic boundaries, living successor governance, ambiguity and anti-evasion closure, continuation-path exhaustion, and terminal silence. The corpus is explicitly finite at any given version. Each instrument has bounded scope, authority, evidence state, and function. Future cases are handled through a living successor system that permits amendment, extension, correction, fork, merge, retirement, supersession, and reopening when a genuinely new material distinction arises. The governing continuity principle is to preserve truth, identity, agency, accountability, evidence, ecological integrity, and recoverable future possibility through materially consequential transitions while preventing avoidable irreversible harm. The terminal architecture reduces present cases through distinction, relation, state, authority, action or omission, effect, evidence, remainder, successor possibility, correction or recovery, continuity, and back to distinction. Analysis stops at local operational silence when no remaining distinction changes the present outcome. A closed branch reopens only when new evidence, actors, effects, dependencies, rights, technologies, causal paths, boundaries, or successor states introduce a materially new distinction. The corpus also establishes a Human-First Principle: humans are the purpose rather than raw material; understanding precedes optimization; agency remains with the human; transparency matters; capability does not create authority; and no metric outranks the person it is intended to serve. Spiritual, consciousness, metaphysical, and cosmological material is preserved as cultural, philosophical, phenomenological, or hypothetical model space unless independently established by evidence. The framework expressly distinguishes belief from evidence, experience from external proof, metaphor from mechanism, and spiritual authority from legal authority. This publication is intended for adoption, adaptation, debate, research, legislative drafting, standards development, institutional design, and public-interest governance. It is not enacted law, legal advice, medical advice, financial advice, or engineering advice. Scientific control values included in model standards are illustrative and should be replaced by the values of the competent scientific authority at the time of adoption.
Authors: Sanchez, Noelia, Interval Studio
Language: English
Topic: Environmental law and policy
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214214582