In the midst of collapse, as we watch our governments lay waste to our social agreements, it can be hard to imagine extending the franchise of legal rights and sovereignties to the More than Human world.  And yet, if we’re to transcend this moment, it must be because we have become something other than we are now, and to do this, we need the roadmaps that show us how to move through—and beyond, the collapse of the old into something new.  We spoke to Ally Pimor about this a couple of weeks ago and when I first met her, I also met this week’s guest and they had so much to say, that I wanted to talk to each of them. 

So with this in mind, this week’s guest is Brontie Ansell, the founder and co-director of Lawyers for Nature. Brontie founded Lawyers for Nature in 2019 with the (fairly infamous) barrister Paul Powlesland, they are a collective of lawyers who act to represent Nature. They reimagine the law for Nature and advocate for Nature to be given legal rights through education, Nature centric governance, consultancy, research and advocacy. Last year Lawyers for Nature were behind the We Are Nature campaign that sought to change the dictionary definition of Nature at the Oxford English Dictionary to include humans as part of Nature.

Brontie was one of the key legal architects behind the Nature on the Board project at Faith in Nature and she was the first human to act as the Nature Guardian speaking on behalf of Nature at the company Faith in Nature, giving Nature a voice and a vote on a corporate board for the first time in history. She then went on to design the legal apparatus to appoint Nature and the voice of future generations to the board of House of Hackney, a company that credits Nature as their most important muse. Most recently she was advising the Comisiwn Seilwaith Cenedlaethol Cymru/National Infrastructure Commission for Wales on their Nature Representation pilot. She features heavily in both Simeon Rose’s new book Nature’s Boardroom and Frieda Gormley’s book In the Company of Nature. She has been a lecturer in law for 15 years, most recently at the University of Essex where she was an associate professor at Essex Law School. Brontie has taught courses on Rights of Nature, climate justice, employment law and land law. Her work is informed by the global rights of nature movement and she is grateful to all who came before her to create the bedrock for work she does. Brontie talks to me about what a society could look like if we really reformed the meaning of ‘justice for all’, and started to understand Nature and aspects of Nature as a subject of law.

Because of the times we’re in, I felt I could not ignore the shocking events that occurred in America this past week week and so we started with a quote from Elliott Morris and Strength in Numbers, which I was confusing with another organisation – Strength in Numbers is, in fact, a Substack blog – well worth reading. I’ve put a link in the show notes, along with a few others that I think are worth adding to your must-read list every morning.

Last week – with his permission – I read a bit from one of these, by Oliver Kornetzke as part of the intro (hi Ollie if you’re still listening!). I’m not going to make a habit of this every week, but I want to read something from Jackie Summers blog, Field Notes for Cracking An Empire, where she says,

‘If you’ve been reading my work for the last few years, none of this should be surprising. The old narratives are gone. This is what fascism looks like in real time. First, ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Good, a white woman. Now they’ve murdered Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old US citizen. A nurse with no criminal record. White women’s bodies were supposed to be sacrosanct. Respectable professionals were supposed to be “off-limits.” That’s no longer the case. For Black people, this country has always been fascist. What’s new is who else is inside the blast radius. The Venn diagram of “safe” and “endangered” is now a circle. If you’re shaken, it’s not just grief. It’s narrative whiplash. The distance between “this can’t happen” and “it just did, on camera” no longer exists. You have choices. You can either cling to the lie and let someone else keep paying. Or pay the cost of updating the story about this country. About who is “safe,” about what you’re willing to do now that protections are gone. I’ve said it before, the empire can handle outrage. It has no defense against empathy at scale. Outrage spikes, trends, and fades. Empathy—“it can be me; it already is them”—changes what people are willing to risk and protect. This is recruitment by atrocity. Your blood spilled red in the streets, just like ours. It shouldn’t take this. It always has.’

There follows one of the most cogent, clear, useful, grounded lists of how we can all join what has been called well-organised Anarchists. And if that’s what we are, I’m not sure that’s bad. At the end, Jackie writes – If you’re going out, your first job is coming home. If you’re staying home, your first job is staying human. I’m writing this from the privilege and safety of a rural home in the UK.

Wherever you are in the world, please look after each other. And for ideas on how we can transcend this moment, to start reimagining a world which sees us as humans who reconnect with each other and with Nature, and give Nature the rights it deserves to thrive, please listen on to Brontie Ansell and her beautiful models of Quiet Romance, Care, Guardianship and justice for all life.