The More Than Human Life Project (MOTH) is an initiative of the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Program at New York University School of Law. 

Climate change, biodiversity loss, toxic pollution. We know that this current state of affairs is not sustainable – certainly not in the long-term and, as we’re seeing in the increasingly severe impacts of the climate and biodiversity emergencies, not even in the short to medium-term, either. 

To get to the heart of this problem, we need to develop, refine, and mainstream paradigms, norms, strategies, activities, and thought leadership that create a pathway for re-embedding humanity within the larger web of life that nourishes and sustains us.  

What ideas, norms, and actions might those be? What types of activities would trigger the larger cultural shifts needed to heal the rift between humanity and the more than human world? Who do we need on board? 

MOTH is a long-term effort to document, discuss, disseminate, and advance ideas, strategies, partnerships, and practices that offer creative and rigorous answers to these pressing questions and others. It is centrally concerned with providing an experimental platform for ideas and partnerships in this area that have transformative potential but currently lack the resources, mainstream acceptance, visibility, or opportunity to realize it in practice.

We deploy a mycelial mode of thinking: we connect different parts of the more-than-human rights field, bolstering individual actors’ work while cohering a larger community of practice and knowledge – much like mycelial networks are often the foundational builders of rich and complex ecosystems. 

César Rodríguez-Garavito is the founding director of the More Than Human Rights (MOTH) Project and the Earth Rights Advocacy Program at NYU School of Law. He is a Professor of Clinical Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. César is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose work and publications focus on climate change, Indigenous peoples’ rights, and the human rights movement.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights. César has been an expert witness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights, and Indigenous rights cases. He has conducted field research and environmental and human rights investigations around the world, including in Brazil, India, South Africa, the Caribbean region, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico, Peru, and the United States.

Carlos Andrés Baquero-Díaz is a research scholar with NYU Law’s Earth Rights Advocacy Program (ERA) and a core member of the MOTH project. He graduated from the JSD program at NYU Law, where he worked on the intersection between property rights and environmental protection in tropical forests. Carlos Andrés holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from NYU Law, where he was a Hauser Global Scholar and 2019 recipient of the Jerome Lipper Award. He also has a J.D. from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), where he graduated cum laude, and a B.A. in Political Science from the same university.

Jackie Gallant is a lawyer at the NYU Law’s Earth Rights Advocacy (ERA), where she works on legal actions, projects, and initiatives addressing the intersection between existential environmental threats and rights. Acting as a generalist in the field, she works on a broad set of issues and lines of work, including rights-based climate litigation, more than human rights, youth climate activism, and biodiversity and rights. Jackie holds a JD (cum laude) from NYU School of Law and a BA (magna cum laude) in International Relations from Brown University.

Patricia Gualinga is a human rights and land rights defender from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Throughout her life, Patricia has dedicated herself to protecting her community from human rights violations caused primarily by oil exploration and militarization.

In 2012, she was a witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a landmark case filed in 2002 about the impacts of oil exploitation on her community, which concluded with the court ruling in favor of the Sarayaku people. In 2019, she received the Brote Activismo Medioambiental Award in Spain, in October 2021 the ALNOBA Courage and Leadership Award in the USA, December 2021 Al moumin Human Rights Award and recently the Olof Palme Human Rights Award 2022 for her leadership in the struggle to improve indigenous living conditions. She currently supports and leads the Mujeres Amazónicas collective dedicated to the protection of the environment, indigenous peoples, women’s rights and land rights.

Merlin is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. (merlinsheldrake.com)

Giuliana Furci is foundress and CEO of the Fungi Foundation. She is a Harvard University Associate, Dame of the Order of the Star of Italy, Co-Chair of the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, and author of several titles including a series of field guides to Chilean fungi and co-author of titles such as the 1st State of the World’s Fungi (Kew, 2018). Giuliana has held consulting positions in U.S. philanthropic foundations as well as full-time positions in international and Chilean marine conservation non-profits. She sits on the Board of Fundación Acción Fauna and on the Advisory Board of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), as well as other organizations.

To read more about the Fungi Foundation, please click here: ffungi.org

Robert Macfarlane is the author of books about people, place and nature including Underland, The Old Ways, Landmarks and The Wild Places, as well as — with Jackie Morris — The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. He has written films including River (2022) and Mountain (2017), both starring Willem Dafoe, and collaborated with musicians including Johnny Flynn, Cosmo Sheldrake and Julie Fowlis. His work has been translated into many languages and widely adapted for stage, film, television, music and radio. He is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities in Cambridge, and his current book-in-progress is called Is A River Alive?, and concerns the lives and deaths of rivers and the global Rights of Nature movement.

David Abram – cultural ecologist and geophilosopher – is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. In his first book, David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity.

Dr. Abram has received numerous fellowships and awards, including Rockefeller and Watson Fellowships and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. He recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. He is Co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) and a distinguished teaching Fellow of Schumacher College in England, and for 2022-2023, David was a Senior Scholar in Residence at Harvard Divinity School.

Monica is a research scientist renowned for her pioneering work in plant communication, cognition and subjectivity. Recognized as one of Biohabitats’ 24 most Inspiring Women of Ecology, alongside Jane Goodall and Rachel Carson, her research challenges conventional boundaries of intelligence and inspires new ways of relating to the natural world. Monica’s contributions include numerous influential scientific papers and books, including Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) and The Mind of Plants (2021). Currently, she is a Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) in evolutionary ecology in Australia and a free-roaming explorer, bridging Western and Indigenous Science to develop innovative approaches to planetary challenges. More at www.monicagagliano.com.

Ramiro Avila Santamaría is a lawyer, former Justice of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador (2019-2022), and Professor of Law at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar-Sede Ecuador. He’s the author of several publications, among them: Los derechos económicos, sociales y culturales. Doctrina, jurisprudencia y normativa (Quito: UASB/Ediciones Legales, 2020); La utopía del oprimido: la naturaleza y el buen vivir en el pensamiento crítico, el derecho y la literatura (Madrid: Akal, 2019); and El neoconstitucionalismo andino (Quito: Huaponi, 2016). Ramiro holds a Ph.D. in Sociology of Law from the Universidad del País Vasco, a Master in Law from Columbia University (New York), and a Master in Sociology of Law from the Universidad del País Vasco-Instituto Internacional de Sociología Jurídica (Oñati). He also holds a Bachelors in Juridical Sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE).

Agustín Grijalva Jiménez is a former justice of the Constitutional Court of Ecuador and a Professor of Law at the Universidad Andina, focusing on constitutional interpretation. Since 2011, he has been a Member of the Higher Education Council of Ecuador (CES), elected by merit and competitive examination. Agustín holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh (USA), an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Kansas (USA), and a Law Degree and Bachelor’s Degree in Legal Sciences from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. He has published several books and articles in Ecuador, the United States, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico.

Cosmo Sheldrake is a UK-based multi-instrumentalist musician, composer, and producer. Cosmo released his first single ‘The Moss’ in 2014, which was followed by the ‘Pelicans We’ EP in 2015 and his debut album The Much Much How How and I in April 2018. Cosmo collaborated with Bernie Krause at The Great Animal Orchestra exhibition at Foundation Cartier in Paris and in 2019. He released a series of Wake Up Calls, pieces composed entirely from recordings of endangered birds. In May 2022, he co-produced and narrated a radio show exploring making music with birds for BBC Radio 3’s Between The Ears. He has toured internationally, composed music for film and theatre, and in 2015 he ran a community choir in Brighton. He releases music through his own label Tardigrade Records. He and his brother Merlin are keen brewers and fermenters and have a line of fermented hot sauces.

Elena Landinez is a Latin American interdisciplinary artist. Her practice explores the relationship between the human and more than human world. Marked and inspired by the movement of water and dreams, Elena relies on her own style of magical realism to portray diverse artworks, through collections, drawings, writings, photography, and paintings. Her poetry is an invitation to think of new paths based on her imagination; it is a call to dream together, to invent other stories. She also participates and creates in different cultural scenes, art residences, and projects in Latin America, connecting different beings through art, as a living place of creation.

She is also an Art Fellow with the NYU MOTH Project, for which she has developed the images and art designs of the Project.

Check her work here: elenalandinez.net

Professor Danielle Celermajer is Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney and leads the Multispecies Justice project. She lives on an intentional Multispecies community on Dharawal county in South East Australia, and through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with this community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide, and subsequently Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future.

Natalia is an Ecuadorian activist and political scientist. Bachelor of Arts at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. Master’s degree in Social Sciences from FLACSO-Ecuador, Master’s degree in Climate Change and Sustainable Development from UASB-EC. She promoted the recognition of Rights for Nature in Ecuador’s Constitution and has worked on the environmental and indigenous aspects of the Yasuní-ITT Initiative to keep oil underground in the Amazon.

Previously President, currently Vice President of the Ecuadorian Coordinator of Organizations for the Defense of Nature and the Environment (CEDENMA). Member of GARN’s Executive Committee, and Global Coordinator of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature – GARN. Secretary of the International Tribunals for the Rights of Nature. Expert of the UN Harmony with Nature initiative network since 2016.

David Gruber is the Founder & President of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative on a mission to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biology and Environmental Sciences at the City University of New York, Baruch College & The CUNY Graduate Center. His interdisciplinary research bridges animal communication, climate science, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology and his inventions include technology to perceive the underwater world (“shark-eye camera”) from the perspective of marine animals.

Ashley is an attorney at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Program at NYU Law. Ashley works on legal actions, projects, and research relating to human rights, climate change, attribution science, and environmental issues. Ashley holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law (cum laude), as well as an M.S. in Entrepreneurship (cum laude) and B.S. in Accounting (cum laude) from the University of Florida. Prior to joining the Center and TERRA, Ashley practiced international arbitration and worked with foreign sovereigns, private companies, the United Nations, and international human rights and humanitarian organizations.

Melina De Bona is an attorney at the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Program at NYU Law and is an Adjunct Professor at the TERRA Clinic. Her work centers on the right to a healthy environment, the nexus between human rights and climate change, and legal protection for the more-than-human world. She holds a J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Chicago (student marshall). Prior to joining TERRA, she worked in international arbitration, white-collar crime investigations, and sustainability.