Have you heard the story of the Trojan horse? Although I am no expert in Greek history, I can tell you that one of the main characters of this story is a horse—a wooden horse, to be precise. According to legend, the ancient Greeks filled this gigantic wooden horse with warriors and left it at the gate to the city of Troy and then they sailed away. The Trojans, thinking the horse was a trophy, pulled it inside of the city, not realizing that the horse held an unpleasant surprise. While everyone was sleeping in Troy, the Greek army exited the horse’s belly, destroyed the city, and won the war.
Setting aside the part about the war and killings, the Greeks’ strategy presents an interesting discussion. To me, the Trojan horse strategy has two main components. The first is the use of one’s existing tools to enter a place of conflict. The second is that, once that tool is inside, it can be used for different purposes than those for which it was originally designed.
Fast forward 3,000 years and the strategy is still powerful. Trading the horse for a moth, we’ve employed it as the basis of the More Than Human Life Project (MOTH), the name of our initiative at the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Program at NYU that builds on the concept of the More-Than-Human-World. MOTH uses legal language to initiate a debate about the life of nonhuman species and the possibility of living under different arrangements and values that recognize the interactions and codependence among human and nonhumans.
Many countries, constitutional assemblies, congresses, and courts have recognized the rights of nature or the rights of specific nonhuman entities. By these rights, I am referring to the general legal recognition that nonhumans, like humans, have legal personhood and rights, such as the rights to life and reparation. For example, the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions pioneered the recognition of the rights of nature. In New Zealand, the National Congress recognized the rights of a river via an Act. Similarly, in Colombia and India, judges have also recognized rights of the rivers.
At MOTH, we’re employing the Trojans’ strategy using a well-known language—legal discourse—to transform the world and the way that humans interact with other nonhuman species. Once inside Troy—or the legal world—the wooden moth will open its wings to spread our message and affect change.
There are three elements that MOTH aims to generate using the moth strategy. The first is political: to recognize the power and rights of the people who have distinct relationships with their territories and allow these communities, such as Indigenous nations, to govern their lands. In many cases, like in the Amazon, Indigenous nations have been the main actors in protecting the forests. For example, the Sarayaku nation (Ecuadorian Amazon region) launched the Kawsak Sacha project to encourage the Ecuadorian government to recognize the rights of their territory and their power of authority—in consultation with the land and other nonhuman entities—to make decisions about what can be done inside the forest. This moth supports the legal and political mobilization of the people who have non-Western relationships with their lands and recognizes that they should decide how to govern those territories.
Second, the moth strategy also encompasses an ethical element. Western societies have created extractive relationships with the land, animals, plants, and fungi and justify their exploitation using a series of moral values that ratify human superiority over nonhuman entities. Stories ranging from the Book of Genesis to John Locke’s theory of property based on the use of land are reflected in Western laws and became fundamental arguments in jurisprudence. In fact, in these political projects, humans are considered separate from and superior to all other species, justifying the treatment of nature as an object for limitless exploitation. The moth strategy is a mechanism to question that superiority and justify a more egalitarian relationship between humans and nonhumans. The moth shows that these property and legal theories, which are embedded into Western laws, are only one option among several that can be used to govern the relationship between humans and nonhumans. The moth questions the ethics of that relationship to support other interactions with nonhuman entities that are not based on a hierarchy but on other value systems, such as collaboration, articulation, and mutual recognition.
The third and final element of the moth strategy is an action-oriented component, which supports a global mobilization to respond to the worldwide ecological catastrophe that includes climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. The consequences of the climate catastrophe, which are often discussed in the media and scientific reports, are well known around the world. This crisis is the result of some humans who have decided to over-exploit nature, concentrate their economic resources, and maintain radical inequalities among humans and between humans and nonhumans. The moth strategy brings hope to political mobilization by highlighting the knowledge of actors who dedicate their lives to showing that another future is possible. In that future, which is already present in communities such as the Standing Rock Nation in the United States or the four Indigenous Nations of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, humans are not the center of the universe and they do not have unlimited rights.
The moth strategy replicates part of the Trojan horse story. If we consider the rights of other species and entities, like moths, butterflies, and rivers, before those of states, then the partnership between nonhumans and humans may transform the basis of Western society. Just like the Greeks’ horse, the use of the legal apparatus is just a strategy, not the end. In this space, creativity, solidarity, and community are alternatives to the static conceptions of tradition, competition, and individuality embedded in legal discourse that states have used for centuries. Hopefully the moth will enter the modern-day version of Troy and continue to expand and fly around the globe, spreading a radical message of communication between different beings.
