Georg Reinhardt on the wasteland where parliament meets
Photo: Photo: Inga Dreyer
“Beyond nature” is written in straightforward red letters above the entrance to the wasteland. There is a small path that runs between the area and the city block. Georg Reinhardt goes first, opens the metal gate into a world in which different rules apply than outside.
What is there beyond nature? Not much at first glance. A few trees protrude into the hazy winter sky. Close to the ground there are shrubs, variegated leaves, scrub and grass. Plants that we seldom look carefully at. But now our steps are timid. As if we didn’t want to accidentally step on one of the little dignitaries.
How can the concerns of non-human organisms, pigeons, trees, worms or fungi be represented and enforced? How can they be protected from climate change and species extinction? In many countries, expert groups discuss such questions under the heading of “rights of nature”. The idea: Instead of being the mere object of human ideas, desires and ignorance, subjective rights should be granted to nature.
How can this work? Rights for Non-Human Organisms? In Berlin-Wedding we are guests of an experiment that tries exactly that in a radically pointed way in practice. Because, so the idea: In the small, inconspicuous area on Osloer Strasse, all living beings have the same rights.
“We cannot uproot trees by our constitution. At most we can prune them so that they don’t shade the entire area, ”says Reinhardt as we trudge through the green-yellow-red of the leaves. The artist, who comes from Austria, is one of the founders of the Club Real group, which in 2019 established the 800 square meter fallow land as the “national territory” of the organisms living on it.
The heart of the wasteland utopia is a parliament. It meets once a year, discusses legislative proposals and makes decisions. The parliamentarians are artists, activists or people from the neighborhood. Everyone can take part and represent a sponsor organism in parliament.
Because there are so many organisms in the fallow land – too many to represent them all at the same time – species are drawn in each legislative period, which are then represented by a person for a year. Specifically, the reddish gloss snail, the deliquescent gelatinous tear, the spotted nettle bug and twelve other organisms were represented in 2021. Around 300 are currently on the list of citizens. The Berlin-Brandenburg Fungal Research Group helped to map mushrooms, mosses and lichens, and residents were asked what they saw for the vertebrates. In the case of bacteria, protozoa, viruses and micro-multicellular organisms, the group has selected some of the myriad of species that are likely to occur.
There are eight groups of organisms: “Herbs, grasses, perennials”, the “arthropods”, “vertebrates”, “mollusks and worms”, “bacteria, protozoa, viruses”, “woody plants and climbers”, the “fungi, mosses and lichens” and “Neobiota”, i.e. all species that were not previously native to Berlin, but were brought here by humans. New citizens have their permanent place in parliament.
In “nature” the principles of evolution normally apply: less well-adapted species are displaced, they have to look for new habitats or they become extinct. “Beyond nature”, however, lies a political space. Not whoever is stronger wins. But those who can argue and convince better. “That means that here in the organism democracy there is no longer any nature. We only have politics, «says Reinhardt.
Sure, what such a single cell or a spider actually “wants” is not that easy to answer. And what is good for one species can cause problems for another. In the furthest corner of the wasteland, right in front of a brick wall, Reinhardt points to a small depression in the ground. It is a “not very attractive from a horticultural point of view,” but ecologically interesting pond that fills up with every rain. “The oriental mortar wasp builds its brood chambers with the damp clay.” The piquant thing is that it brings up to 30 spiders into each of these brood chambers. The animals are paralyzed and serve as food for the wasp larvae. The spiders in the Parliament of Organisms do not want to accept that and file a lawsuit. “The wasp can spread out here with the pond, and that’s a much higher predatory pressure for the spiders. One could argue like that. So from the spider’s point of view, «says Reinhardt.
A bit away from us the undergrowth is clearing, here round white discs on red metal posts protrude from the ground up to knee height, a little like mushrooms. The delegates meet on these seats, which are arranged in a semicircle. In Gelsenkirchen, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Leipzig and Paris, too, there have already been parliaments or other actions by the organism democracy.
The urban green space on Osloer Strasse used to be part of a brewery site, says Reinhardt, holding up a few branches so that we can slip underneath. “It is a stroke of luck that this area was able to develop so undisturbed here.”
The logo of the Lidl supermarket, which borders the wasteland, shimmers through the branches. The discounter would have liked to buy the fallow land and turn it into a driveway, says Reinhardt. In return, the club was offered a less overgrown compensation area. A case for a parliamentary vote, thought Reinhardt and invited a Lidl representative to the meeting.
The herbs, grasses and perennials voted for the exchange: the new, tree-free area promised more light and less competition from woody plants. But other species formulated a counter-proposal: “The project will advertise the Lidl company if it makes all of its compensation areas available throughout Europe for organism democracies,” summarizes Reinhardt. “But then the real estate manager drifted off. Wordless. “
Spiders versus ponds, perennials for Lidl: It moves somewhere between performance art, theater and political education. But thinking about how the concerns of other species can be represented in our human-dominated age, the Anthropocene, is more than a gimmick. Because in the search for an answer to climate change and the massive extinction of species, the rights of nature could play a key role.
A forest as a complainant in court? In some countries this is already a reality. The pioneer is the small Latin American country Ecuador, where the rights of nature have been guaranteed by the constitution since 2008. Anyone there, regardless of whether they are citizens or not, can file a lawsuit on their behalf, says Andreas Gutmann, who did his doctorate on the rights of nature in Ecuador. “The process is super simple. You can just go to the nearest court and speak there, ”says the legal scholar. The court could then decide to hear various stakeholders on the case.
In Ecuador all of nature is considered a legal subject. To protect their rights, the clearing of a cloud forest by a mining company was recently averted. The rights of individual animals can also be sued in Ecuador. In Colombia, where rights are not granted to all of nature, there are individual rivers, mountains and nature reserves that have exclusive rights. One of these rivers is the Río Atrato, which Colombia’s constitutional court granted a right to “protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration” in 2016. That, however, explains Gutmann, leads to difficult questions of demarcation: »Where does the flow end? Does the bank belong to it? And the animals that live there? “
So it is not a novelty that matters of people who are not people are dealt with in court. And in Germany? In German law, companies like Lidl are considered legal entities, but nettle bugs are only objects.
Nature and animal protection are anchored in the German constitution as a national goal, but so far it has not been possible to file individual legal action. In Germany, only those who are affected can usually take legal action. An exception is the class action law, which gives certain associations the opportunity to take legal action on behalf of third parties. But representative actions, says Gutmann, are associated with high hurdles. Only those who are recognized are allowed to sue. In 2019, the animal rights organization Peta tried to file a constitutional complaint on behalf of piglets for the first time. The animal rights organization was concerned with an objection to the extension of the deadline for the neutering of male piglets without anesthesia. In June 2021, the complaint was rejected without a reason.
Other initiatives are also committed to ensuring that people can sue in the courts on behalf of nature. In Bavaria, for example, the “Rights of Nature” initiative has been collecting signatures for a referendum to grant nature rights since September. But according to Gutmann, the topic has not yet made it onto the national political agenda.
One argument against equipping nature with rights is the fear of waves of lawsuits in Germany. Would every homeowner then go to court for the tree in their own front yard? It doesn’t look like that in Ecuador. Gutmann says there have only been a few cases there in the 14 years or so since the constitutional reform. He suspects it will take time for the courts to adjust to the constitutional amendment.
Meanwhile, the extinction of species, the clearing of forests and the destruction of natural habitats are advancing at lightning speed around the world. The climate crisis is worsening. The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns of a red alert for humanity.
Back in Wedding: We leave the garden and stand on the busy Osloer Straße. »We humans do not act as partners within the ecosystem, but rather authoritarian from above. That falls back on us, «says Reinhardt. The organism democracy is about no longer seeing humans as standing outside of nature, but rather as part of it. But what does nature want? And what do deliquescent gelatinous tears and spotted nettle bugs actually need?
“That is one of the crucial questions in the debate,” says Andreas Gutmann. Because in a man-made legal system, including on Osloer Straße, in the end it is people who decide whether and to what extent interventions in natural areas are justified.
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