The EU Charter on Rights of Nature – colliding cosmovisions on non/human relations

How are ‘rights of nature’ conceptualized in the proposed EU Charter on the Fundamental Rights of Nature, and how does this relate to Indigenous cosmovisions whom the experts invoke in their draft text? One the one hand, we find a relationality that focuses on entangled agencies between humans and non-humans. Embedded in particular Andean cosmologies that informed postcolonial, plurinational, and re-constitutional processes in Latin America, this relationality played a major role in advancing ‘rights of nature’ in Ecuador and Bolivia, which the EU experts take as examples when advocating for an EU Charter. On the other hand, we find a relationality that connects pre-existing human and non-human entities, aimed at enabling the former to better protect the latter. These conceptualizations speak to distinct modes of living-with non-humans, each inscribed in particular historical, cultural, and socio-political contexts. Acknowledging these divergences is key to understand the struggles behind ‘rights of nature’ today.