Biodiversity Love and Law

She asks the room to close their eyes and change bodies. Nostrils move to the top of the head, legs fold in, and many tons go weightless. A newborn is lifted by its aunties to its first breath. A mother has called her calf by name since before it was born. Then the hunt: the whales gather, one calls the moment, and they spiral up blowing a net of bubbles that traps fish at the surface. Only then does the recording play. Afterward she names what the room heard as whale culture, elders teaching the young a technique that began in one place and is spreading. People protect what they love, she says, so she builds the love first.

She asks who the 93 fin whales killed in Iceland this season were, and whether their families miss them, then holds a moment of silence. The whales are not Iceland's, she says. They travel the whole globe, yet a sovereign state can hunt them in its own waters. Iceland will reexamine its whaling bill in February, and a ban is only one of the options, so now is the time for pressure from inside and outside the country. She later puts the sovereignty question to Rodríguez-Garavito. And she is turning the tour into a podcast: the parliamentarians behind a failed ban, former whalers who are now vegan, and activists up against the one company that still hunts.

Cases come to a lawyer, he says. At MOTH the whales arrived through Project CETI, a collective of marine biologists, roboticists, cryptographers and AI scientists decoding sperm whale communication. Whales already have a record in environmental law: humpback songs recorded around 1970 helped build the movement behind the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling. They are the most charismatic beings he has worked with. Language is the argument. Once animals were shown to be intelligent, opponents of animal rights raised the bar to language. Showing that whales communicate, and that ship noise, deep-sea mining and drilling impair it, is a legal claim. They also migrate across oceans, which makes Earth visible as one living system.

Biodiversity is a poor word for what they protect, he says. It is life. The evidence says whales are sentient, social beings with cultures and dialects: among sperm whales, the first coda a whale utters marks where it comes from, like saying Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. MOTH turns that into legal subjecthood, though a river or an animal need not resemble us to hold rights. What matters is intrinsic moral and legal value. The work runs at two levels: domestic lawsuits, and He Whakaputanga Moana, an Indigenous-led declaration of whale rights resting on a relationship older than any recording. Polynesian wayfinders crossed the open sea partly by following the migrations of ocean beings.

Frye's question: Iceland does not own these whales, so how can the planet claim them? He points to the common heritage of humanity, an idea from international law built in anthropocentric times that can be turned toward all life. MOTH is starting work with scientific, Indigenous and policy groups on transboundary migratory corridors. The global map of whale migration could be the blueprint for planetary lanes, which cut against national jurisdiction by design. That will take years. Nearer term, marine protected areas operate nationally, and enough of them could form a patchwork corridor in some regions. The high seas remain the gap, and a new treaty gives them a framework.

When he first litigated a rights of nature case, in the Colombian Amazon, few people worked on the idea and it looked like a long shot. Now the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has endorsed it. What gives him hope is that it draws on a reservoir of imagination, and artists have given it life, from documentaries to museum shows. He wants two things from the room. Artists see possibilities the law cannot yet see, and MOTH is working with the London collective Marshmallow Laser Feast to put their images into its campaigns. And beauty recruits: the first thing people tell MOTH is that its website is beautiful, and once beauty lands, political possibilities open.

The Endangered Species Act has kept 99% of the species listed under it from extinction, he says, and it has wide support across the political spectrum. The administration cannot change its text, so it is changing the regulations that implement it. The most egregious is the rescission of the definition of harm. The law forbids harming a listed species. For more than 50 years a regulation has said the intuitive thing: destroy the place where a species lives, feeds or breeds, and you harm it. The administration is acting as if deleting that regulation also deletes the statute's protection of habitat. That is not how laws work, he says, and Earthjustice is in court.

An obscure provision lets a committee of cabinet officials exempt a federal action from parts of the law, even if it could wipe a species out. People call it the God Squad. It had not been used in decades. This year the administration convened it to exempt all the oil and gas leases the government will issue in the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years, by his account, without a legitimate reason or the right process. Earthjustice is in court on that too. The move drew a backlash. Soon after, a bill to rewrite the Act itself stalled, with some Republicans speaking against it. As bad as things are, he says, people will only take so much.

The Roadless Rule has kept roads for chainsaws and logging trucks out of 44 million acres of national forest for 25 years. Earthjustice has defended it the whole time, and the administration is trying to rescind it. It is in public comment, so his ask is to comment against the rescission. Over a million people supported the rule in 2001, by mail, and he wants a million now. Frye pushes back: a single comment feels like it goes nowhere. He gives three reasons it does not. Comments form the legal record a court will read, especially scientific data the agency ignored. They show Congress a million constituents. And they tell the next administration what to undo first.

His practical ask is to use your platform. Earthjustice has a good communications team and reaches only so many people. Biodiversity posts get some of its highest response rates, and the message is stronger when people besides lawyers ask others to care about horseshoe crabs. His second ask sounds less rational, he admits. Tell someone about your favorite species. Everyone is seeing the news of attacks on the environment, but it does not have to be the only news they see. We have to be a reservoir of concern and of love for nature, so that whatever happens in Washington, there is a stronghold it cannot defeat.

Joy and love are critical, she says, and so is remembering that the story is not only doom. She started the Design Science Studio in 2020 because people who want to point their creativity at a regenerative future get little support: money, structure, mentors, access to the people doing the work. It is an incubator and community of practice for artists, designers, writers, scientists and architects, co-founded by habRitual and the Buckminster Fuller Institute. By her count it has reached creators from 50 countries, around 350 projects and 460 people. Design science, from Fuller, is short for comprehensive anticipatory design science: start from the whole, look ahead, design with intention, learn through experience.

At COP15 in Montreal in December 2022 her team arrived too late to arrange projections, so they did one anyway. With If Not Us Then Who, which trains Indigenous and young storytellers, they projected a film of the five Indigenous demands onto a bank tower and the Notre-Dame Basilica, unpermitted, while delegates negotiated 30 by 30. Indigenous people steward most of the wild places a 30% target would protect, so they belong at the front. Later, with the Campaign for Nature, the studio ran a hackathon on the closed rooms where decisions happen. One idea: a doormat, a napkin or a sign reading air brought to you by the Andes. Frye's team proposed a flash mob of endangered birds.

In The End of You, an exhibition at Gray Area in San Francisco, she helped the artist Kelly Skye finish a rights of nature room. One wall held framed portraits of rivers, mountains, watersheds, whales' eyes and spiders. One frame was a mirror. Visitors saw themselves in the more-than-human family, and many told her it landed: I have these rights, and so do they. Her newest project, piloted at Caravan two days earlier, is a web chat with someone in 2075, on the timeline where we failed to change, moving from grief to hope to action. Coral Vita, her partner on it, told her the bad future was not bad enough. Make sure it is true.

Doom, gloom and fear get you only so far, she says, and then they disengage people. If sustainability is doing no harm and regeneration is actively healing, we already do regenerative agriculture for soil and regenerative architecture for buildings. Stories should follow. Much of what social media feeds us is extractive and rooted in fear, and there is no time left to burn people out. Her recipe: root the story in love, awe and curiosity to hold attention. Make space for grief, because positive bypassing fails too. Look for the helpers, as Mr. Rogers said, so people know they are not alone. End on a clear call to action. Then resource people for the long road.