Mian Crist
speaker
152 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 26 Jul
Mian Crist’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Basically, he says they're looking out the window and they're not really paying attention.
It's this long lecture.
And so he says, what would a radically different law-driven consciousness look like?
A consciousness in which nature had rights.
Yes, rivers, lakes, trees, animals.
How would such a posture in law affect a community's view of itself?
And this is a quote from Stone.
He was talking to McFarlane.
And apparently there was a bit of an uproar in the classroom and the students got really involved and this idea really sparked a bunch of thinking.
And it gets picked up almost 40 years later after he first sort of coined this notion of nature's rights.
A Maori legal scholar called Jacinta Ruru sort of picked up this idea, and I'm going to give a quote here from McFarlane.
It struck her that an affinity existed between Stone's young concept of legal personhood for natural entities and the longstanding Maori relationship with rivers as living sacred ancestors.
So she kind of picks up this idea and it gets applied to certain rivers in New Zealand.
And it really is kind of linking the Maori legal system and the state legal system in an interesting kind of way.
And in 2010...
ruru and her student james morris published this article called giving voice to rivers i'll read a quote here they say the legal personality concept aligns with the maori legal concept of a personified natural world by regarding the river as having its own standing the mana or authority and maori life force of the river
would be more likely to be regarded as a holistic being rather than a fragmented entity of flowing water, riverbed, and riverbank.
And this concept of the river as a whole entity is useful in the legal sense because extractive processes taking things from different parts of the river tend to damage the river ecosystem as a whole.
And so they're using this idea to say, you know, you can't just look at a river as these individual bits that can be pulled apart and used for human consumption or human need or human wants, but that this whole river deserves some kind of understanding in a holistic sense legally and should have rights.
So seven years after publishing this article, Morris and Ruru helped to form this really extraordinary piece of legislation, which is called the Te Awa Te Pua Act.
Showing 101–120 of 152 · page 6 of 8
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