About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

11 Austl. Animal Protection L.J. 5 (2015)
The Sentience of Plants: Animal Rights and Rights of Nature Intersecting

handle is hein.journals/ausanplj11 and id is 5 raw text is: The Sentience of Plants: Animal Rights and Rights of Nature Intersecting? Alessandro Pelizzon3 and Monica Gagliano4 The emerging legal theory known as 'Earth Jurisprudence' has grown exponentially in the last decade. One of the most notable proposals of this novel legal theory is the attribution of subjective legal status to nature, a proposal that has already been legislated in a number of jurisdictions, as discussed below. The recognition of nature as a subject of and with rights raises a number of questions, most notably concerning the issue of agency of and on behalf of nature. Similar questions have been already explored by the animal rights discourse, in its attempt to confer subjective legal status to animals. The importance of the intersection between 'Earth Jurisprudence' and animal rights is thus readily apparent. Emerging scientific research has revealed that plants show all the traditional indicators of sentience. This casts doubt upon the utility of the traditional rigid division made between plants and animals. It also suggests that sentience is a contingent and fluid concept; one that depends upon a constantly changing combination of scientific and cultural assumptions. These developments suggest that the fundamental proposal of 'Earth Jurisprudence', that all things have rights by virtue of their very existence, may not need to be based on such as 'sentience', but may be used as the premise for a radical challenge to many anthropocentric legal principles. In doing so, 'Earth Jurisprudence' can learn from the legal tradition that has developed around the concept of animal rights, while at the same time stretching all previously established boundaries that traditionally extended rights exclusively to non-human animals alone. INTRODUCTION: WHEN LAW AND SCIENCE MEET In 2012, one of the authors of this paper, founder and then board member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, the Australian Wild Law Alliance and the Earth Laws Network at Southern Cross University, convened a colloquium entitled 'Animal Rights and the Rights of Nature - Intersections and Tensions', to explore the intersection between the rights of nature and animal rights discourses. Although many might consider animal protection law advocates and rights of nature proponents natural allies, this very quickly appeared not to be the case during the colloquium. The classical divide between eco-systemic approaches faced against the specific concerns of individual animals was rehashed,s with dividing arguments as to the actual interaction between the two legal perspectives. At the same time, the other author of this paper was exploring communicative and cognitive abilities of plants. By adopting a quantitative approach commonly used to test these abilities in animals, the exploration delivered innovative, rigorous, experimental evidence showing that plants can not only acquire learned behaviors (i.e. behavior that is not innate but one an individual develops by being taught or by observing others) in a matter of seconds but that they also remember what has been 3 Dr Alessandro Pelizzon is a Lecturer in the School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University. 4 Dr Monica Gagliano is a Research Associate Professor in the Centre for Evolutionary Biology at the University of Western Australia. 5 See, for example, R Nash, The Rights of Nature (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). (2015) 11 AAPLJ 5

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most