Los Cedros comprises 4,800 hectares of remote, mostly primary, forest in the Cordillera de la Plata massif in the northwestern Andes, in Ecuador’s Imbabura Province.

The cloud forest, which is shrouded by a permanent mist, hosts astonishing biodiversity. Los Cedros is part of the Choco Phytogeographical Zone, one of Earth’s most biodiverse places. It brims with abundant epiphytes—plants that grow on other plants—some 400 bird species, over 200 species at high risk of extinction, and several critically endangered species.

But 8% of the Andean cloud forest was destroyed between 2001 and 2018. The main threat is metal mining, which requires deforestation for mining benches and road networks, dynamite explosions for ore access, and solvents like sodium cyanide for leaching that often end up polluting waterways. The Ecuadorian government in 2017 quietly granted Canadian prospecting company Cornerstone Capital Resources a concession to extract copper and gold from Los Cedros in collaboration with Ecuador’s state mining company, ENAMI. Los Cedros’ fate seemed sealed—until it was saved in what some have called “the case of the century.”

On November 10, 2021, after hearing testimony from Indigenous communities, Intag Valley activists, scientists, artists, and mining representatives, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador found that mining in Los Cedros violated groundbreaking “rights of nature” articles in Ecuador’s constitution that were ratified in 2008. The court’s decision set a historic precedent on how those constitutional articles would play out in practice.

Now, the forest is at the center of legal proceedings once again—this time testing the limits of copyrights rather than constitutions.

In copyright law, moral authorship protects a person’s right to be recognized as the author of a work and not have that work falsely attributed to others. Moral rights can’t be bought or sold, and they do not grant economic rights.

The Los Cedros petition is far from the first effort to creatively or legally recognize more-than-human moral authorship. In the famous 2011 “monkey selfie” case, animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals unsuccessfully argued in a United States court that Naruto, a crested black macaque who had taken some striking selfies with photographer David Slater’s camera, should be recognized as the author. Animals have been credited as co-authors, even sole authors, of academic papers. And Karen Bradshaw, author of Wildlife as Property Owners, noted that there is also a much longer history of “Indigenous governments that have always acknowledged the co-creation of life and creativity in all of its forms in conjunction with nature.”

However, this petition is the first attempt to legally recognize the moral authorship of an ecosystem. Rodríguez-Garavito said this makes the case stronger in Ecuador, given its constitution explicitly recognizes rights for nature generally, not specific species.

For Furci, the song is about connection as much as rights: about people being taken into the song as well as taking things away from it. It’s an invitation into “animism, something epic, something shared and beautiful—something that is for everybody,” she said.

Sheldrake hopes the song will help people question the assumption that “creativity that’s worthy of recognition is solely in the domain of the human.” He also wants to encourage others “to ask similar questions, or push at different boundaries and see what happens.” To that end, “Song of the Cedars” was published through MOTH Records: an experimental new home for creative work probing these frontiers. This all chimes with Sheldrake’s previous music, through which he’s collaborated with an array of more-than-human “instrumentalists” and “vocalists” and redistributed royalties to relevant conservation organizations. 

But in the Los Cedros case, omitting economic rights from the petition was deliberate. For Sheldrake, economic rights represent a legal and philosophical “can of worms” that would distract from the simple moral claim they are making. Rodríguez-Garavito also cited a concern that pursuing economic rights might unintentionally perpetuate the logic of private ownership, and the enclosure of the commons, to nature itself.

The petition’s rejection—unsurprising given anthropocentric legal understandings of authorship in Ecuador and beyond—may land in trial. “We anticipated that the petition would be rejected by this administrative agency, and that we would ultimately take this to court,” said Rodríguez-Garavito. 

The rejection rested on two lines of reasoning, Rodríguez-Garavito said: First, that only humans can hold intellectual property rights; and second, that because the song is mostly natural sounds, it isn’t original enough to deserve copyright protection. But he argues this is vague and contradictory. 

“You either say that this is an original piece of art that was created by these musicians and lyricists, but that only they, as human beings, deserve the protection of copyright law,” Rodríguez-Garavito said. “Or, you say that this is mostly sounds of nature, and then you recognize some sort of authorship to the forest.” 

Advancing to the courts could prove beneficial. “We’re interested in having the court extract the logical conclusions of its own rulings,” said Rodríguez-Garavito. 

Even defeat in court could prove fruitful. “I don’t see huge downsides in making arguments that might not get there,” said Kevin Schneider, counsel to the Earth Law Center. Failed cases can lead to “really compelling dissenting opinions that lay out a path for the future. And when you look at the way the law changes, it pretty much always happens like that.” For example, Justice William O. Douglas’ dissent in the 1972 case Sierra Club v. Morton, in which he argued that nature should have legal standing, is regarded as a landmark moment in the early rights of nature movement.

But what if the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, or any court, does recognize moral authorship?

One possible consequence is more robust enforcement of the rights of nature. Agustín Grijalva Jiménez was the reporting constitutional judge in that 2021 Los Cedros ruling. In a recent interview, he explained that testimony from writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers was important in informing the 124-page judgment. “If you see all that beauty, all that biodiversity, all that life, emotions play a role,” he said. Such artistic expressions of nature could gain even more judicial sway if nature were granted moral authorship.